Nice to see some action here. I originally wrote a bloody novella, but edited it considerably, out of compassion for humand-kind. [;)]
So, to save a few hundred words of mere description, here's a clip:
http://www.rubato-music.com/Media/mp3/LvB_phantom_reverb_example.mp3That snippet is totally dry, from beginning to end, yet it really sounds as though certain sections, or even just notes, have a kind of reverb applied. (And please, no "lessons" about short-note samples, and release samples -- I'm aware of what they are and how they work, and am aware of what I'm hearing. I'm actually just relaying the subjective experience of my client after listening to the passage. Also, I'm aware that it really doesn't make sense to listen to these samples totally dry, and told my client as much when they expressed concerns about the spatial "tricks" they observed.) I broke the passage down, note-by-note, and realized that this is *strictly* the result/effect of hearing the natural decay of the instrument, as it interacts with the early reflections of the room. The most obvious passage is the forte perf-legato toward the end, which seems to jump into an entirely different space. Obviously, we can't have the smoothness, and beautiful naturalness of the perf-legato without this side-effect, so it seems to be a matter of somehow adding such a "releaseverb"(!) to the rest of the articulations. Of course, I could also just choose a different articulation, but the perf-legato seems musically most appropriate, and avoids too much exposure to the perf-marcato, which has a *very* distinct "signature" in its attack portion. This is why I was wondering about tricks to give those notes which are lacking pronounced natural decays more of the release-decay effect. More specifically, I was curious whether the MIR will find ways of negotiating such spatial/resonance side-effects. (For example, if I smoke a sufficient quantity of opium, I can imagine a system whereby the MIR, since it is said to use meta-data about which instrument being played, actually *inserts* these release-like resonances into the music -- almost like adding a form of release sample at the processing stage... but... as I say, I only imagine this after loads of opium!)
It's worth mentioning, though, that these acoustic effects are only an issue because of the fact that the VIs have come astonishingly cloes to duplicating "real" performances. The realism of the VIs is so convincing that our ears become fine-tuned to genuinely "natural" hearing, which is to say prediction. With other libraries much of this would not be an issue, as our ears wouldn't actually be "tricked" for so much as a measure, let alone a whole passage. This is also why Dietz's solution of using more articulations, in a more varied way, is a good one, but can also be problematic -- as the realism of the performance approaches parity with the "real thing", our sensitivity to unexpected acoustical variances becomes proportionately more acute. The only thing we can do is to select samples, and make decisions about *adjacent* articulations, very carefully...
JWL. As far as "solving" the problem of number of articulations vs RAM/CPU/HD usage, I suspect it can be done (and Herb is all-too-aware of my position on this subject!), but I honestly don't think it can be done in real-time, as an instrument. I'd say more, but there's not much point. I know what would be better for my workflow. But that's just me. If your workflow is entirely different from mine, you could arguably manage large orchestral arrangements on a single machine, with 2 GB RAM -- the VI design is probably the only piece of software that makes such a feat genuinely feasible. I've been tempted into listening to demos of other libraries online, and rarely get through so much as a single mp3 (the Garritan violin and Synful are the only exceptions) -- the lack of sampled-legato is a *glaring* omission, and strikes all other libraries off the list, in my opinion, and for my purposes.
Undertaking the creation of the Vis has been an outrageously ambitious probject for the VSL. When we "buy in" we vicariously share in that ambition. But the fact that I am, once again, in the position of actually considering dropping another $3k on hardware, is the result of my ambition alone. The *potential* exhibited by the VIs has poured a bucket of fuel on that fire, but it could never be said to have ignited it in the first place. It was burning long before VSL even existed.
Dietz. Any more thoughts on my "phantom reverb" issue, after hearing the example above?
cheers,
J.
