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)
