Guy - you're talking about Broadway Big Band? You're not impresssed? Expression?

Huh? Did you listen to the Kurt Weill-ish cue? The solo trumpet?

No jazz/pop brass demos I've heard have come within 50 miles of that.

Now, I haven't tried the library and have no idea what it's like to play, but from what I've heard it brings pop horn samples to the level of the big orchestral libraries.

Journalists like me never get excited about new products, of course - I hope I sound suitably droll.

[6]

Droll means humorous. So by your own definition you're suitably funny. Sounds about right.

And yeah, Broadway Big Band is killer and from this viewpoint the highlight of is those two solo trumpets. The saxes are good too.

Look forward to seeing you @ NAMM. Should be an invigorating show this time around.

What the hell is Guy Bacos talking about? That Broadway thing is the best sample library I have ever heard besides VSL. Incredible sound and expression! I am blown away by the sound ... [[:|]]

also by the price... [:'(]

Nick,

I admit the solos and drums are cool but the overall timbre of the brass (especially playing together) is weak to me. Give me an example piece of a good brass sound, not solos. in fact sometimes it reminds of stuff done 10 years ago. Hey if you're gonna pay a lot of money for it...



William,

I respect your opinion, please respect mine.

Dour. They both start with D followed by other letters. That's enough to confuse me...

Looking forward to seeing you too. I hope it is invigorating - usually NAMM is more of a extreme sports event where the object of the game is to try and finish a sentence before you see someone else to say hello to. [:)]

Guy, maybe after trying it out I'll find it to be total crap and agree with you. So far that seems very unlikely, but who knows. It's certainly nothing like what we had ten years ago, though - that much I'm certain of.

Your Konzerthaus Bach Toccata is oustanding, by the way - really great.

I sincerely hope to change my mind about this, I would love to use this lib...

Oh Nick, yeah thanks, the Toccata and Fugue was fun to do, I wish I could actually play with my feet those ped. parts.

@Guy said:

... in fact sometimes it reminds of stuff done 10 years ago....

Hey Guy: please expound, if you would... thanks.

@DG said:

The one big fault in VSL VI is the phasing issue on Velocity xFade. This is the area where I waste most time whilst programming, so if that could be fixed (Herb says not until faster PCs exist) then the next real technological leap has to be much further than anyone has so far suggested.

Just curious, why do we need faster computers to do this? Can they not just "pre-process" the samples? Not every single time, but as a one-off.

Apparently this is what Garritan has done with the violin and cello, so there is no extra strain on the processor trying to perform real-time computations.

Regards,

Ben H

@DG said:

The one big fault in VSL VI is the phasing issue on Velocity xFade. This is the area where I waste most time whilst programming, so if that could be fixed (Herb says not until faster PCs exist) then the next real technological leap has to be much further than anyone has so far suggested.

Just curious, why do we need faster computers to do this? Can they not just "pre-process" the samples? Not every single time, but as a one-off.

Apparently this is what Garritan has done with the violin and cello, so there is no extra strain on the processor trying to perform real-time computations.

Regards,

Ben H
I wouldn't pretend to know what the technical difficulties of this "morphing" are. However, if it sounded like the Garritan instruments, I wouldn't buy it.

DG

@DG said:

I wouldn't pretend to know what the technical difficulties of this "morphing" are. However, if it sounded like the Garritan instruments, I wouldn't buy it.

DG

Hey DG,

I wasn't commenting on the sound of the Garritan instruments so much,

I was more questioning whether some offline, pre-processing of the samples would mean that the heavy computations of "morphing" would not have to be done by the user's processor at all.

Ben H

correct me if i'm wrong, but velocity x-fade would happen in a plane (vel-axis, time-axis) so there would be (almost) endless combinations needed to be preprocessed. and *someone* would need to know where these samples are located and when to use which.
christian

Hey Christian,

I don't pretend to know all the intricacies involved in the process, I was more relaying a response from Gary Garritan when he said that the samples in his violin and cello were "pre-aligned," so that there was no extra CPU hit from calculations for the user.

Regards,

Ben H

I share Ben's puzzlement. The average modwheel crossfade covers four samples per key. Two is not uncommon. Is pre-alignment of four samples (per key) that difficult? It might be. I also don't know anything of the technicalities. To my non-technical mind, it sounds like a tedious and lengthy processing task, but not prohibitive.

I think it is the time element involved (unless I am mistaken). VSL solo violin uses completely real recordings of notes. Garritan uses artificially processed recordings. So you can align those artificially tweaked notes, but you cannot align real, living, human notes quite as well.

This is a bit mysterious. I suspect he's using some variant of additive resynthesis by inverse fft. This method does allow control over phase, if I'm not mistaken. And when you know the precise pitch of each note your resynthesizing, and there's not too much noise content, ifft can sound very good. What I don't get, though, is how this would handle differences/fluctuations in natural vibrato rates between different samples. But maybe it doesn't need to deal with those.... Mind you, I haven't really heard much of the instrument, so I'm not sure how seamless it really is.

J.

@William said:

Garritan uses artificially processed recordings. So you can align those artificially tweaked notes, but you cannot align real, living, human notes quite as well.

Okay thanks.

I did not mean to be critical of VSL, and I am sure that you are doing everything possible to make great, playable, and innovative instruments.

Kind regards,

Ben H

Ben, never be worried about being critical of a product. You are the customer and are paying for the product, so you have a right to expect it to be as good as possible.

Regarding the Garritan instrument, whilst I find the technology very exciting and would like to be able to use it with my VSL sounds, the huge let down for me is the sound. As a violinist I will obviously be more critical of violin samples than I would of others, but I think that it sounds absolutely horrible. I've not heard the raw samples, so I don't know about their quality, but I suspect that some of what sounds so dreadful to me is caused by all the processing that is needed.

The fact that Herb has already mentioned the processing power needed to do xfade properly says to me that at least VSL is trying to come up with solutions. The power of modern CPUs is increasing at a tremendous rate at the moment, and it is possible that in the near future many of the things that we want will be realised. I have a huge list of things that are not good, don't work properly, need re-editing etc. with Vienna VI, but the only reason that I have such a list is that IMO there are no other products on the market that are of suffient quality to know where to start the list. [:D]

DG

I'd say that just about sums it up DG, as usual.

I agree on the sound of the Garritan violin. It sounds to me something like an old-fashioned electric violin. Though not as good. [6]

Also, JBM don't you think what is being done with the aligned waveforms is similar to that "synful" thing? It had a similarly artificial sound, and used a complicated script to morph waveforms for legato and timbral dynamic changes.

OK, folks, here I come: I quite enjoy working with the Garritan violin because you can really play it with full control of vibrato and such. Already before acquiring the Garritan violin I started changing my mind to favor a more musical solution over the perfect sound and was reprogramming all my sounds. I can listen more relaxed to the mockups I did since then.

But I have to agree that most of the demos sound downright horrible. But one can do much better than that.

@mathis said:

OK, folks, here I come: I quite enjoy working with the Garritan violin because you can really play it with full control of vibrato and such. Already before acquiring the Garritan violin I started changing my mind to favor a more musical solution over the perfect sound and was reprogramming all my sounds. I can listen more relaxed to the mockups I did since then.

But I have to agree that most of the demos sound downright horrible. But one can do much better than that.

Mathis, I don't want to derail this thread too much, but do you think that some of the problems with the Garritan violin are connected with the fact that it does have control over things like vibrato? I wonder whether part of what sounds so bad to me, is that I get the feeling that it sounds like a young kid let loose in a sweetshop. Kind of all effect, and no substance. Any thoughts about this?

DG