12 Jul
2006
12 Jul
'06
7:52 a.m.
On Friday 07 July 2006 15:23, John Anderson was like:
ONe of the things that I find somewhat grating about
certain soundfonts
is that the vibrato on strings is always exactly the same. Some way to
give that some variation would also be nice.
Absolutely. The range and shape of the variations could be programmed into the
instrument definition and linked to a spare MIDI controller. I can forsee us
deprecating MIDI in favour of something like OSC for serious work,
eventually. Obviously the format will have to remain negotiable for backwards
compatibility reasons, but by and large I find MIDI and soundfonts so
horrendously limited as to be only really useful for demos. I'd like to see
proper microtonal support in all sound-producing applications, currently only
ZynAddSubFX handles this nicely. For me 12Tet@A=440Hz always sounds out of
tune. YMMV. Not being a confident programmer I'm finding Csound,
supercollider and even Pd et al., rather complicated to get into and I have
taxi'd up the runway many times, great for experimenting, but I haven't made
the time to learn how to produce quality results - I suspect most ordinary
musicians won't either. In general, I'm finding the process of creating new
instrument sounds to be less straightforward than I would like it to be, be
that editing soundfonts, csound orchestras, ZynAddSubFX patches or whatever.
Really I'm yearning for analog synths, I have fond memories of playing with
MS10s, SH101s and my old Pro1 and the kind of resonant filter sweeps that are
possible with analog filters. Is the sound I am looking for simply not
possible digitally? Would anyone with the appropriate skills consider
modelling VCS3 or Prophet filters in software? The closest application is
probably Alsa Modular Synth for what I want (as I'd like to be able to filter
samples too), but it does appear to have limitations. I shall persevere,
obviously.
--
cheers,
tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk/tim
We are the people We've been waiting for.