[linux-audio-user] Lend me your ears

[james at dis-dot-dat.net]

On Mon, 30 May, 2005 at 04:57PM +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo spake thus:
> Luke Yelavich wrote:
> 
> > I agree with everything that everybody has said so far. I also think 
> > that if possible, the lower notes of the piano could be improved in 
> > quality. They sound very grainy in my opinion, and even in electronic 
> > music, I like to hear a piano sound that is clear, and doesn't sound it 
> > has gone through some bad analog processing. :)
> 
> Luke, did you know that he uses Cheesetracker for this stuff?
> 
> Personally I'm a little surprised that he gets such a good sound 
> out of a tracker. I think this is down to a couple of reasons:
> 
>   0) Cheesetracker must be better than most trackers in terms of
>      sound quality.

It works at the samplerate of Jack - 44100 in my case.

>   1) The quality of James' compositions fools me into ignoring the
>      audio quality.

Well, I can't play a single instrument and music theory is alien to
me, but thanks.

>   2) His use atmospheres and sweeping sound effects hides some of
>      the graininess.
>   3) Careful choice of samples which don't contain too many high
>      frequency components.
>   4) I'm listening to this stuff on a crappy set of headphones 
>      hanging off my laptop.

All of this isn't as much of a problem as you might think.
Admittedly, using samples for everything has drawbacks - you can't
move too far away from the original pitch before there are noticable
effects, but just as you would with a soundfont, you just have
multi-sample instruments.

> > BTW. What are you using for the bass sound?
> 
> Its quite possibly a sine wave :-).

See previous message.  I have used sine waves in the past, with a bit
of distortion to give them some character.  I also make quite a lot of
use of very short (one or two cycles) samples looped and played as a
synth.  You don;t have the scaling problems of full instrument samples
and, as long as it's the ounds you want, they sound good.

James

> Erik

-- 
"I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated Development
That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb.  Thank you."
(By Vance Petree, Virginia Power)