23 Feb
2004
23 Feb
'04
4:05 p.m.
Man I missed a discussion. Sucks not having a net connection at home.
First and Foremost.
Pete, please keep on doing whatever the hell it is you want to
do. It was great getting in this morning and having a freshmeat
announcement with an update of specimen. This mail is not a feature wish
list for specimen (or for anyones sampler) this is just what I like
sampler wise.
Second Samplers.
Like many people on this list I had been using hardware boxes
for years. In the end, the last 2 pieces of gear I gave up were my SY99
and my Yamaha A3000. I gave both of these up solely because of Native
Instruments Kontakt (sampler) and FM7 (fm synth). Up to that point I had
been using the outboard gear and PD. Native Instruments showed me the
light. (subsequently I have built an FM7 clone in PD, and I am slowly
working on a Kontakt clone, but one of my favorite sound manglers (the
multi breakpoint envelopes, are pretty impossible to do in pd from a GUI
standpoint and tough to understand from a shear command driven list of
numbers standpoint)
Things Kontakt did that made me want to switch.
1. Easy of importing a bunch of samples at a time (or if you have a
GUI use it right).
You could drag a sample onto the keyboard window. It would map
the root to the key you dragged it to. You could then pull out the
borders of the key (left and right set range, up and down set velocity).
Samples could be dragged over each other, and you could set cross fade
between the overlapping samples.
I was sold the day I needed t0 import a couple of hundred
chopped up bits of sound. It took me 5 minutes to set up 2 sound banks
in Kontakt, I gave up after about 3 hours on the a3k.
2. Modulation sources and Destinations coming out my ears.
Modulator can be tempo (midi time clock) synched. Pretty much
every parameter can be modulated (even ones most people wouldn't want to
modulate). You can even modulate the parameters of the modulators with
more modulations, its very GNU.
LFOs with sine, tri, square, saw, random and multi waveforms (optional
tempo-sync with definable quantize times)
Envelopes: AHDSR as well as 32-stage flexible envelopes
Envelope follower
32-stage step modulator
Glide/portamento
Velocity
Release velocity
Key position
MIDI controller # (numbers freely assignable)
Pitchbend
Poly aftertouch
Mono aftertouch
To me these are the 2 most import aspects of a sampler (the
fundamentals have to be there, like multi-sample playback, loop start
and end points, Pitch and Amplitude control, not just envelopes but
coarse and fine adjustments, allow me to assign my envelopes to all of
these. Having an internal Filter is debatable, but if you are going to
put it in there make sure I can modulate that to! I don't want a sample
editor, not even normalize or other common DSP stuff). It made sense to
have it built in back when that sampler in the rack was the only thing
that understood samples. But now I have resound, and audacity, and snd,
and etc etc etc.
I guess now that I am thinking about it, one thing Linux people
could (and do) do in many cases is to give me complete access to all of
this stuff from the command line. It would be a wicked ass command but
if I could set up a complex instrument with a script, and then play it
without a GUI, ohhh I am drooling thinking about the weird stuff I could
force a sampler do.
m.
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