Track and Conclusion

For the final step of this assignment I chose to do a cover after Avicii - You make me, the track produced was a success but we encountered a problem at editing, I heard a weird click on one of the sampler notes so I had to cut and loop that sample in order to achieve a clean sound.
Is still a lot to be done at this multi-sample instrument in order to achieve a proper piano sound but the sound that it makes at this stage is very close to the real deal.
In terms of future approach I would spend a lot more time in recording it and also in editing of the sounds, I would make more groups to choose from.

Special thanks:

Nino Auricchio

Andres Caicedo

Than Zat

Further editing and Processing in KONTAKT

In kontakt the first problem encountered was that I did put a long starting time so I end up having a delay of 9ms before the sample starts when a key is pressed, the only solution to that was to move the starting point of each sample at the beginning of the sample. If the starting marker is not placed at zero crossing point you will end up having a click whenever you press a key at that particular velocity.

As I said earlier we had some notes recorded that were a little quiet so I had to adjust each velocity to produce a similar amplitude or a close one for each note. Studying kontakt libraries I learned that they usualy use 6-7 velocities for a proper piano sound and each note has his individual group we used only one group with each note having 4 velocities.

In terms of processing I used a reverb to give a sense of space, a flanger at 0.5Hz and a little colour added to it to add some variation to the sound for a more realistic approach a 3 band eq where I boosted the heights and lower the low frequencies. I also used a stereo enhancer for even more space. 

After I achieved a proper piano sound I decided to do a couple more types of piano sounds, one of them which is the simplest one, was the closed lid piano which was made only by using a 3 band eg where I got rid of a considerable amount of high frequencies. After the closed lid piano I came with the idea of making a big room piano that was achieved by using a cabinet effect.

After making the basic ones derived the idea of making an untuned piano that was achieved by untuning a couple of notes and I went even further after watching a clip on youtube about HONKY piano, what I did was to untune a large amount of notes and then pan them to left and right, in this way I end up having the Carnaval piano.

For the 80's piano I used distortion which is made by the twang effect along with a low pass filter, tape saturation and some eq.

For the 90's piano which sounds more like a electronic piano I used a cabinet along with tape saturation which gives a bit more colour to the sound and for the instrument bus I used a chorus and phaser along with a stereo enhancer.

And the final and weirdest one is the space piano which is a combination of 90 piano with something else this type the phaser has the same modulation frequency with the flanger additional I added a transient designer with a faster attack and a vow effect which enhances the boundary between low mids and low frequencies and high mids and high frequencies.

I also tried to do a cheep piano which consist of only one note in our case the middle C spread trough all the notes but for some reason the high notes sounded really chopped off so I try to use every time machine and pitch follower but nothing worked so I decided to leave that idea aside.

Editing

In terms of editing I used Logic Pro 9 with the strip silence option which allowed me to cut the samples really fast, a problem encountered was cutting the samplers with a proper starting point and a good length.
The recording was made all at once time so we end up having close to 5 hours of recording, using the strip silence option on the whole length was a mess because the software couldn't always recognize the very low velocity notes. Having this problem, I had to cut each individual note that contains 4 velocities and only then use the strip silence. Because I planned to use later on, Kontakt as the main sampler, I had to rename every sample taken out of Logic in a specific order, in my case I chose : (Group Name)_(Single Key)_(Min. Velocity)_(Max Velocity). The second field is called "Single Key" because I wanted to make a proper multi-sample instrument containing individual sample for each of the 88 keys of a piano, I also recorded the entire decay time taken by a note to come down to complete silence. I did all this in order to achieve a more realistic sound, I also had some problems at editing not all the sounds had the same velocity and some of them contained background sounds so for some of them I had to write a different velocity and for the others I had to use kontakt looping option.

Another problem encountered was the velocity cross-fade option used in contact, If the samples don't start at the same time you better not use that because you will have a weird sound coming out (which contains both notes) when the pressed velocity is between the two cross faded velocities.

Planning and Recording

The planning of a multi-sample instrument consists of choosing the instrument, inform about how it produces sound, choose a proper live room, place the instrument in the best sounding position and make the most out of the stereo or mono recording techniques that you have chosen.

In my case I picked out the piano because I used a proper piano player, the piano is not a moving instrument which helped us placing the microphones and seemed a good idea at the time, later on I ended up having hundreds of sounds to choose from but I will get to that in a bit. 

As we all know an upright or grand piano has 88 keys. I also managed to find out all the keys and the frequencies required for each key  in order to achieve a proper piano sound:

Having a proper piano player 50% of the work is done before starting because the time for post production diminishes considerably. The first problem encountered was, how to record the notes to be easier to edit, so I came with the idea of making a table with each note and the frequency required for that note, in this way I could figure out if the piano is in tune and how the notes will be recorded. Another great thing that saved me time was that we recorded each note at 4 different velocities starting from the bottom (Left side) to top (Right side).

The studio chosen was EFS1 where we recorded the grand piano using 2 stereo techniques and a room microphone. We used a XY pair of AKG C414 in front of the piano right inside and the second pair of XY Sontronics STC 1 at the end of the piano to get the resonance.

Sontronics Orpheus was used as a room microphone but because is a very sensitive large diaphragm condenser microphone  we couldn't use the sound of it because he picked up every sound made from outside.

We used 96kHz sampling rate at a resolution of 24-Bit the whole recording took 5 hours and has a size on disk of about 15GB.

The software used for this recording is Pro Tools 10.3.7 with the HDX Rednet audio interface.

A brief history

Originally developed by experimental musicians working with electroacoustic music, those musicians did not had modern equipment so they had to physically manipulate tape loops or vinyl records on phonograph. The first commercial available sample instrument was invented in 1963 called "Melotron" and by the late 1960s the use of tape loop sampling influenced the development of minimalistic music.
Later on, the sampler was used to create hip hop music and spread even further with the rise of electronic music in the 70's. Today samplers are used as an industry standard for music, radio jingles, movie sound effects and more.

Introduction

Creating this blog allows me to introduce the reader in the world of sampling and multi-sample instruments, this blog is showing my understanding of sampling along with the steps required to achieve the same or a similar virtual instrument.

The following blog will contain a brief history of samplers, the definition of a sample instrument along with planning, recording, editing and processing.

I stated above that a sampler is a virtual instrument, that is not 100% accurate due to the fact that a sampler contains recorded sounds of a real instrument in our case a piano.

In most cases a sample instrument contains a few notes recorded with different velocities that are spread using tracking on more notes usually a couple of semitones higher and a couple lower. Let's say, a piano has 88 keys, for a proper multi-sample instrument a decent number of notes recorded will be around 44 each having 4 different velocities, low, low mid, high mid and high. With more notes recorder a more realistic sound you will get.