How To Add Instrumentation To A Sample

Terminal time, we looked at Pro Tools 2018's recently added virtual instrument, the UVI Falcon . We took a basic look through the features of what is a very deep and powerful workstation, capable of complex synthesis and sampling techniques. Here, nosotros're going to delve a little deeper into the instrument. We're going to employ a sample library we've recorded ourselves to build a sample-based instrument from scratch.

For this sample musical instrument, we're going to utilise samples of a 16-primal Malian balafon, purchased at the Maison des Artisans in Bamako, Mali, while fortunate plenty to be visiting the country for the Festival Au Désert back in 2010. The instrument was recorded in Metropolis Studio A, with assistance from Liam Nolan, through a stereo pair of Neumann TLM 170 microphones placed almost three feet above the balafon and a further spaced pair of Neumann M 49 room mics. We recorded four velocity layers per key, and have mixed the close and room mics together to create 64 samples to exist loaded into Falcon.

It's possible to create a sample instrument from a single sample, using the built-in pitch-shifting to map a unmarried note out beyond the whole keyboard, but the farther from the source pitch you go, the more than synthetic the sampling is going to exist. Similarly, you can use the aamplitude envelope to map velocity to level, but this won't requite you the variation in tonality that a real instrument gives when it is played heavily or softly. In the early days of sampling, when hard-disk space was at a premium, information technology was standard exercise to utilise every bit few samples as possible.

While it could be argued that the limitations of the sampler helped to create the character of those instruments, they didn't tend to sound all that realistic. More than recently, hyper-sampled instruments with tens or even hundreds of samples per note are being created, providing incredible detail. However, this level of detail takes an incredible corporeality of time and patience, not to mention skill, from the performer, recordist and sample library coders.

For this sample instrument, we've recorded iv samples per key, capturing each of the 16 keys, which are tuned to M#/Ab, B, C#/Db, E and F#/Gb (an E major pentatonic scale, commonly played as a C# pocket-size pentatonic), spread out beyond three octaves. From this, we tin create a sampled balafon with some of the dynamic response of the real thing, with velocity controlling which of the iv samples per key is played, as well as at what volume. We have a greater pitch range than the real musical instrument, too, by using pitch-shifting to create the missing notes of the chromatic scale.

In addition to pitch, it'southward important when edifice a sampling instrument to get the amplitude envelope configured in a realistic-sounding way. Most instruments take a circuitous relationship controlling the note length, with the musician able to hold notes for considerable amounts of time, while other instruments are more percussive in nature, such as the balafon we're using hither.

Each time a key is struck with the mallet on the balafon, it rings out for a fixed (and quite brief) length of fourth dimension. It could be muted, to shorten the length of the notation, only there isn't much a musician can exercise to lengthen it further. For playing as a sample musical instrument, we want to emulate this type of behaviour, and then nosotros don't need to set up whatever sample looping points to effort and extend the length of the annotation.

Similarly, we want to try and make sure that the full sample plays out every time a key is hit. This is done from the amplitude envelope in the sampler. This module also controls how much variation at that place is when triggering a sample at its lowest and highest velocity position. If we don't ready some amplitude variation, and so we will only hear the four velocity strengths that we've recorded providing any dynamic interest.

Learning how to create your own sample instruments opens upwards whole new creative options in Pro Tools with UVI's Falcon instrument. In add-on to sampling whatsoever unusual instruments you come up beyond, yous tin also create unique, custom instruments from any sounds you might happen to record.

The more than you experiment with audio blueprint, the more sounds y'all might come across that yous want to be able to create entire instruments from. Sampling enables you lot to pitch-shift even a single example across a whole range of notes to create custom instruments.