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Anderton How often to people play bass harmonics?

The only times I can think of are:
- during bass solos
- while accompanying acoustic instruments with no percussion
Any other time, I'm pretty sure they'd get lost.

This one-hit-wonder from the '80s makes subtle but effective use of sampled bass harmonics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6k6ll7x2H8
Example at 0:54, and similarly in the last 2 bars of each verse before the start of each chorus.

Guitarpima
I just looked up that bass. The specs are the same? Swamp ash body, maple neck and a rosewood fingerboard?
 
I used to have a Warmoth guitar with similar specs...Anyway, that guitar had tons of sustain as well. I think people may overlook that combination of woods for their guitars. I miss that guitar at times.

I visited one of the EB bass designers today to get a more detailed answer on why the sustain is so good. He said you're right, the woods do indeed make a difference and that the Babicz bridge is a huge factor. But he also said the set in neck plays a major part in the sustain.
 
I have a meeting set up with Cakewalk in a few hours to discuss he blog and how to get the EB-5 Dim Pro instrument out into the world. I should be able to finish it by the end of the week.

Well, if it's a bass for Dim Pro, you'll have to make the samples out of tune. <grin, duck and run>

I'm going to have to let Sony know about this.

 
It's been happening for a while now, Craig (6-7 years).  I'm not certain of the specifics, but I did receive confirmation of the phenomenon from Rene Ceballos.  I had thought that I was overriding the points with GUI controls or .sfz.  I believe he was using Audition for his loop point requirements, and suggested the same to me.
 
It's a shame, too, because the capabilities of embedded loops never get explored by those of us using Sound Forge as the go-to editor.

... for Rapture (which doesn't do multisamples) ...

All the respect in the world, Craig, but this one bothered me at a fundamental level.  DimPro is optimized for longer samples, sure, but ...  Rapture is about two features short of being the ultimate (six string) guitar synthesizer.  Samples or wavetables.
 

I don't like how the formant shifts when you transpose a sample, and I want this to sound really good.

 
The Shift parameter (somewhat unique to DimPro) has its uses.  It won't save an extreme transposition, but it can offset smaller intervals (not to mention creative application without complimentary offset values).
 

Well, if it's a bass for Dim Pro, you'll have to make the samples out of tune.

 
Now that is just good (insider) comedy.

A video on the major steps of sfz construction would be helpful to many, I think. I have downloaded a few different programs to do things with sfz files, but never done much with them yet :(
 

b rock I believe he was using Audition for his loop point requirements, and suggested the same to me.

 
As far as sampling, I did my first-ever this weekend and gravitated to Audition to complete the task. I have a friend I talked into a TD-9 a couple years ago, and it made it into my house last weekend. I ended up sampling it 20 sounds at a time, removed noise from those "masters," then used "Mark Audio" with custom settings to get all of the envelopes. It was sort of a painful exercise until I got a nice work flow to it, but saved them all as 32 bit waves files and then batch normalized them when done. 552 samples... ugh!

Anderton


Sorry, no..."give it back" as in I borrowed it from the Gibson USA factory, I didn't buy it. But I'm seriously thinking of buying the new SG Standard bass or the 4-string EB.

Surely you already have a bass...
Acquiring a bass was a major priority for me when I started recording years ago.
 
http://axiology.bandcamp.com

Axiology

Anderton


Sorry, no..."give it back" as in I borrowed it from the Gibson USA factory, I didn't buy it. But I'm seriously thinking of buying the new SG Standard bass or the 4-string EB.

Surely you already have a bass...
Acquiring a bass was a major priority for me when I started recording years ago.
 
http://axiology.bandcamp.com

Yes, I have a very nice bass, actually...it was made by Bruce Becvar for Chris Squire, and the koa wood is gorgeous...but, with the tuned coil tap option Gibson's using on the pickups (different from standard coil tapping), there are eight distinctly different sounds I can get from the EB. That elevates it to "really useful in the studio" status.

Update on the Dim Pro bass sampling: I figured out how to add a short release time last night, I wanted to get rid of the "click" at the end of notes. All it takes is adding a "group" command, which affects all the samples. More details will be forthcoming on the blog, but it's as simple as one command with the release time specified in seconds:
 
ampeg_release=.1
 
The more I get into this, the more I'm finding it's really not that complicated. And the bass is sounding really good
 
I think I might post an unlisted YouTube URL (just for the people reading this thread) that leads to a piece of music using the EB-5 bass instrument in context.
 

Anderton
I doubt it had a fuzzbox built in 

Gibson actually made a rare "EB-0F" model with a built in fuzz.

Check this out...multisampling every note is really tedious, and sampling every open string then transposing the root note to cover a range of notes sounds sketchy because the formant doesn't shift (the difference between splits doesn't bother me so much, because different notes do sound different on bass).
 
So I tried sampling every open string, then copying samples to fill in the notes between samples. For example, I sampled E and A, and copied the E to what would be become the F, F#, G, and G# samples.
 
Now, here's the cool part: I used the transpose function for audio to shift the pitches. So for the F, I transposed a copied E up one semitone. For F#, I transposed another copied E up two semitones...etc. There's a Bass Solo transposition algorithm (how extremely convenient!!), and it really does the job.
 
As to sound quality, it doesn't sound at all like standard sample transposition because the transposition algorithm seems to preserve the formant. In some ways, I prefer it to the sample-for-each-string approach because there's more consistency (it's really hard to sample each note with the same attack, tone, level, etc.) yet there's a timbral change when changing notes among strings.
 
This technique really speeds up the sampling process, to say the least.

I am actually needing bass harmonics, to complete a midi cover of a Steve Morse tune - Night Meets Light.  I have had trouble finding them.
 
Bob Bone
 

Fantastic Mr. Anderton. Can't wait to check it out. 

jkleban - thanks for the tip. I don't have a MIDI guitar here to test, but I see where you're going with this! I'm of course keeping all the raw samples so I can use them in various contexts.
 
The harmonics thing didn't work out well. I need to re-think that.
 
BUT - I did come up with something very cool and unexpected (and totally by accident!) - a really sweet harpsichord-like instrument. As a way to say "thank you" to everyone for their participation in this thread, I'm going to zip it up in the next day or two, and provide a 7-day download link in this thread. Watch this space...

Craig,
 
Bet it was very tedious and boring to sample the bass guitar... especially if you let the tone ring until it naturally decayed completely (sometimes takes 30 seconds or more) and then sample multi velocities of the same note/fret.. takes hours, many hours.... try holding a fretted note that long on a bass without glitching it up. It turns out to be also fatiguing. Usually wind up using a CAPO for the sampling... and then the hours of editing the samples in Sound Forge and keeping track of the samples by note and string.... sampling both DI'ed and mic'ed up... many samples, many hours totally boring task.
 
I would be interested to hear how the bass came out though.

jkleban
Craig,
 
Bet it was very tedious and boring to sample the bass guitar... especially if you let the tone ring until it naturally decayed completely (sometimes takes 30 seconds or more) and then sample multi velocities of the same note/fret.. takes hours, many hours.... try holding a fretted note that long on a bass without glitching it up. It turns out to be also fatiguing. Usually wind up using a CAPO for the sampling... and then the hours of editing the samples in Sound Forge and keeping track of the samples by note and string.... sampling both DI'ed and mic'ed up... many samples, many hours totally boring task.
 
I would be interested to hear how the bass came out though.

I wasn't that fastidious about it in terms of multisamples of velocity and DIed/miked! As you point out, just letting the tone ring out completely takes a while.
 
I usually take advantage of velocity and filtering within the player itself (i.e., Dim Pro) to handle tone and level changes with higher velocities. As for miked vs. DI, I sample DI and use amp sims for the cab/amp sounds. My experience has been that bass works really well with amp sims, because you're not doing a super-distorted sound so you don't get the same kind of high-frequency artifacts that happen with guitar. For bass cabs and amps, I particularly like the IK Multimedia SVX and also the bass amps and cabs in Waves G|T|R.