Guitar and brass?

Are these inherently difficult to sample? Some of the brass samples (particularly trumpet) sound pretty good (tho not across the entire range). Almost all of the acoustic guitar sound pianistic especially in the middle registers. Just curious...

If you play you know what I mean.

Guitar's my main instrument. I was trying to understand why a 1 octave c scale (without mutes, bends, glissando, sustain, etc) played on a keyboard sounds like a harpsichord to me. I've heard that brass and stringed instrument harmonics are very difficult to synthesize, but the strings in Dim Pro are very realistic. They're sampled and sound like it. Actually they're great! I would think that strings would have the same limitations as guitar but they don't seem to. Still curious.

More than the inherent complexity of sampling a particular instrument, the reason why most sampled instrument sound artificial are related to the nature of samples and sampling itself.

When you pluck a guitar string, the sound it emmits depends on several physical aspects, such as the dynamics of the activation (angle of pick, strength, time of pick/string contact, guitar movement, etc.), and the previous status. Just as an example, the first time you pluck the string it comes from being idle (no vibration), but if you pluck it again it starts from a previous vibrating condition. Therefore, the sound of both picks is different. If you repeat those plucks at two different time intervals, you get another pair of different sounds. Basically, you never get two notes identically sounding out of a guitar.

When you play a key in your keyboard, you trigger a sample, which is a snapshot of a single pick. It's always the same sample playing. There are a few tricks which are used to minimize the 'machine gun' effect that you hear when you play, such as alternation (playing different samples at each note event, which is in use in a couple of guitars in DP).

How you play the sound is also a huge factor. As previously said, make a keyboard chord with an oboe sound and it'll sound keyboardish.

-René

I think what makes an instrument is that it is an instrument of expression, or it would not have been an instrument at all. To think that you can take a snapshot of a single expression and duplicate that and create art is a mistake.

So what we are missing is the artistic feel of sampled stuff. You can make pretty good sounding stuff for demo, but rarely anything called art. It's getting better and better as new generations of technology develop, but we are still neaderthal level I think. To make top-list productions works ok, I think, but it should not be confused with art.

As a guitarist I have never been that amazed by synthesized guitar sounds until Dimension. The sounds always sounded sterile and dry therefore I had to add a lot of chorus, eq and reverb but Dimension changed that. A real hidden strength of DP is the piano string resonance model. My personal favorite SFZ acoustic guitar secret (not very secret anymore) is to use the piano string resonance model with guitars. To do this start by edit your favorite guitar .SFZ file to include the piano string resonance model from one of the piano models (like Grand Piano 3v 4th sim.sfz). Note that one could reduce the number of strings if throughput is an issue. The piano string resonance model is listed at the bottom of the SFZ under effect. For ease of use I included it here.

<effect>
type=strings
strings_number=36
strings_wet_oncc1=100

Save this new guitar SFZ under a new name. Note that when this SFZ is now included into your favorite acoustic guitar patch the mod wheel now will control the sympathetic string resonances therefore be sure to check the midi matrix if mod wheel is assigned to vibrato or filter cutoff and then reassign other effects away from the mod wheel.

To sample this effect take a good fingerpicking acoustic guitar track and disable all delays, chorus and reverb to obtain a very dry guitar sound. A simplistic example in Project 5 would be to set the arpeggiator to an acoustic guitar fingerpcking pattern 10 (AccGT 10) and play the lowest sounding E note. Then vary the mod wheel to add these resonances and the guitar will seem to get fuller sounding.

Finally note that this trick with piano the string resonance model can be used for other sounds.

I also agree that to properly sequence guitar tracks one needs to have detailed knowledge of guitar technique like keeping track of which strings to keep sustaining, arpeggio and strumming timing and velocities. I have learned alot about my guitar technique by sequencing some of my fingerstyle guitar arrangements.

Sorry for being so wordy for my first posting but this is a topic near and dear to my heart.