On Thursday 19 February 2004 21.54, Pete Bessman wrote: I've been hanging around the SDL years for a few years now, so it's quite likely you've seen me there. (I'm the guy with the parallax scrolling examples, glSDL and Kobo Deluxe - and the just released Fixed Rate Pig example game.) Anyway, I'm not involved in any team efforts, and I'll probably be using Audiality (off-line + real time synthesis) for the music in my own games. (Kewl Technology Factor and very small downloads. :-) That said, it might be an interesting excercise to remix your song using only or mostly script based sounds... (Modular synthesis, basically.) Dunno if there's much point it trying to synthesize the guitar riffs at this point, but I'll try all sorts of instruments eventually. There are a few synthesis operators and features I want to add first, though. //David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate .- Audiality -----------------------------------------------. | Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia. | | MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... | `-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -' --- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---

On Friday 20 February 2004 00.06, Pete Bessman wrote: [...] Yeah, that was my first thought. Another approach would be to record the unprocessed guitar sound, compress/resynthesize that one way or another (plain audio, mp3, custom tuned compression algos, resynthesis using using physical modelling etc in increasing order of difficulty), and then apply guitar FX and speaker emulator plugins on the result. I think the most important part is to preserve the subtle details from the real guitar sound, as the lack of realism in the playing technique is what kills most synthesized guitars I've heard so far. No problem, though the current version supports only WAV files (whatever formats SDL supports) and a custom raw format used for caching sounds on disk. I'll add support for one or two audio file libs soon, though. Yeah, that's probably a better idea, unless I can come up with some very cool way of resynthesizing the real guitar sound. Generally, if it is synthetic, it's a bad idea to pretend it isn't. Better try to make it sound good than realistic. Dunno, really. I listen to most kinds of music, though the current state of mainstream music has been driving me towards SIDs, other old game music and related stuff over the last few years... (And I used to write and listen to euro, pop techno and the like! *heh* I'm finally starting to understand people that just generally hate everything near "mainstream", no matter what that may be at the time.) Anyway, I found some sample mp3s and other audio files, and I like what I hear. Guess I'll have to order some CDs... :-) You mean the original album version? Can't seem to find it... //David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate .- Audiality -----------------------------------------------. | Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia. | | MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... | `-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -' --- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---

On Friday 20 February 2004 17.25, Paul Winkler wrote: I think that would be quite doable. The synthesis would be the hard part. It might be a total PITA to play on a keyboard - but that's not the idea anyway. What I had in mind was rather to extract that kind of information from the audio data recorded from the real guitar. More like an audio compressor specifically tuned for guitar sounds than a generic guitar->MIDI converter. I don't really care if the result is a normal (playable) MIDI instrument + MIDI events, scripts that render entire riffs as single waveforms, or more traditional forms of compressed audio. I just want it extremely compact (preferably in the "few kB" range, like normal 100% synth Audiality songs) and good sounding. If the data can be played from a MIDI keyboard or something in a useful way, that's just an extra bonus. //David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate .- Audiality -----------------------------------------------. | Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia. | | MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... | `-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -' --- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---

On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 02:34:54PM -0500, Pete Bessman wrote: if I were a synth, I would not be able to play guitar, lacking fingers; but since I am myself, I can play guitar or synth depending on what I want ;-) I guess I misjudged the direction of the conversation. I do think it's interesting to think about realistic synth emulation of guitar, but not very practical - it's just so thorny. Palm-muting is just one of the many tricky issues. Think of the variables introduced by common picking techniques: at the least you have to consider stiffness of plectrum (or finger), force of pluck, and distance from bridge. Much more practical, I think, is to do as you suggest: invent synth sounds that capture something of the character and attitude of a given guitar sound without trying to duplicate it sonically. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com Look! Up in the sky! It's ANTI BUNNY-MAKER! (random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)

On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 11:11:40PM +0100, David Olofson wrote: Interesting. How the heck do you record that? -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com Look! Up in the sky! It's MAYOR HYDRO-LAMP SNAIL-DOG! (random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)

David Olofson <david(a)olofson.net> wrote: All you really have to do is get close. {voxengo.com has an excellent {excellent} reverb that's based on the idea. He also has some impulses... I don't remember what the license was. He also has a few links to some other sites that you can get them from.} Soundforge had the impulse modeller thing several years ago. I've ended up combining stuff with whatever wave file seemed suitable. {saw and square waves and reed samples being the best... you can even model sounds with themselves.} I'm not searching for anything specific though. Soundforge came with a huge directory full of precise images...they did have a lot of them up on their pages. {I'm not sure what Sony's done with them though.} they're not necessary unless you're going after scientific precision. With plain wave files you can use the thing like a synth. Once you come to understand what specific wave files will do when you combine them you start to get precision. -- Though your brother's bound and gagged and they've chained him to a chair won't you please come to Chicago just to sing? In a land that's known as freedom how can such a thing be fair? Won't you please come to Chicago for the help that we can bring? {Graham Nash}

On Saturday 21 February 2004 07.37, RTaylor wrote: [...] Haven't tried running the demo, but I listened to the demo mp3s. Quite interesting stuff, but most of it sounds very synthetic, or rather metallic, to my ears. The main reason for that is probably the comb filter/vocoder artifact that's rather prominent most of the time. I frankly don't like the sound much at all, but I have a feeling it's mostly a matter of throwing more DSP power (and/or a smarter algorithm) at the problem. //David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate .- Audiality -----------------------------------------------. | Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia. | | MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... | `-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -' --- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---

Paul Winkler wrote: <p class="heretic"> why spend precious coding time faking electric guitars when there are so may excellent and highly trained guitarists around? nothing against electronic sounds where they are appropriate. but when you need a crunchy guitar, simulators strike me as the wrong tool for the job. :-D </p> -- The handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user's hand. That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace. - William Gibson, "All Tomorrow's Parties" Jörn Nettingsmeier Kurfürstenstr 49, 45138 Essen, Germany http://spunk.dnsalias.org (my server) http://www.linuxaudiodev.org (Linux Audio Developers)

[David Olofson] the most promising concept if you want realism is probably physical modeling, i.e. a waveguide. used with a filter modeling the response (resonance) of the guitar body, you'll already have a good start. a bit more troublesome will be feedback between strings, but doable. as has been observed, the real trouble starts when you want to model the non-linear aspects, like palm muting, finger tip interaction with the string during oscillation, when releasing or tapping, and most importantly the plektron or finger exciting the string. there's some very interesting work by someone at hut.fi (sorry i'm so vague on this, it's some time ago i read it) on modeling the piano. the biggest part of it is dedicated to the hammer striking the string. iirc, it needs oversampling. and the interaction of the hammer with the piano string is much better defined than that of the plektron (let alone finger tip or nail) with the guitar string. for a cheap and quick solution, you'll probably have to reduce the complexity by a fair amount. i would imagine sampling different string-exciting techniques, analyzing and reducing them to a simple data set and blending with a waveguide or even simpler oscillator model could be fruitful. it won't be easy to faithfully emulate the transients and their decay over the whole range though. for palm-muting you just might get away with a rigid low-pass feeding back to the oscillator. that being said, i concur with jörn. :) cheers, tim ps: thinking this over, i seem to remember those guys at hut.fi doing some quite nice work modeling an acoustic guitar, too.

[Marek Peteraj] yes, that's the one. nice hunting! :) tim