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)