Gigasampler Tutorial: Lesson 7
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With the previous lesson we concluded the description of the Gigasampler Instrument Editor. In the next lessons I will present some instrument patches that take advantage of the potentiality of this program. In general, I will present examples and tutorial, and not an instrument bank useful for your music. The .gig files will be small, with few notes sampled at 11.025 Hz. Often I'll include also a MIDI file. I will not tell you how to build the bank, but why I decided to program it in that way. I hope you have learned how to build the bank in the previous lessons!
The first instrument is snare_dynamics.gig, that shows how to use the velocity splits in the simpler way. I created a region with four velocity splits, and I assigned at each one of them a sample of a snare hit with different intensities: pianissimo, piano, forte, fortissimo. Since I'm working with percussive sample I disabled the "pitch track" case in the "mix/layer" menu: in this way the sample will be played with his original pitch, "as recorded", in all the region. The velocity splits acts, in this case, just as their name suggest: if you hit a note on your masterkeyboard with different intensity, you will play a snare with the corresponding intensity: low note velocity correspond to a snare hit softly, while high note velocity correspond to a snare hit hard.
In bass_slap.gig is shown a more creative way to use velocity splits. I created only two splits, and separated them at a velocity value of about 100 (you can move the line between the split clicking on it with the cursor and moving up or down). If you play you keyboard softly, you will have a "normal" bass, but if you hit more loud you will produce a "slap" bass sound. Obviously, this instrument is difficult to use live, but with a sequencer you will be able to create more realistic bass line in a simpler way.
The last patch is guitar_short.gig, and is quite complex. I created 2 velocity splits and a dimension with 4 split for each note. The dimension is assigned to controller 1. I used a lot of samples: I sampled the notes G, G#, A, C, D of my guitar. For each note I recorded 4 times the same short note, 2 times strummed with the plectrum upwards and 2 times strummed with the plectrum downwards (the sample DO1_C4, DO2_C4, DO3_C4, DO4_C4 - where C4 is the unity note) and 4 times the same note "muted" with my right hand palm and by lifting a bit the left hand finger from the guitar neck (Samples DOmute1_C4, DOmute2_C4, DOmute3_C4, DOmute4_C4). Clearly, each note is different form the other, because it is impossible to reproduce two time the same sound with a guitar! I assigned to the low velocity splits the "short" notes, while at the high velocity splits I assigned the "muted" notes. At the different cases of dimension 1 (zone 0-31, 32-63, 64-95, 96-127) I assigned the four different kind of samples (do1, do2, do3, do4). In this way, just as in the bass_slap.gig patch, if you hit softly the masterkeyboard, you will produce the "short" note, while if you hit more hard you will the trigger the "muted" note.
Why four samples per note? My personal opinion is that when in a MIDI sequence the same note is repeated many times (for example a snare, a hihat, an ostinato bass sequence) the result is very monotonous and unreal. This happens in particular when you are trying to reproduce a real instrument: a bass player will never produce two times the same sound playing the same string, just as a drummer hitting an hihat or a snare. Gigasampler can simply manage multisampling, and you have not to worry about sample size! Sampling different variation of the same sample (snare, hat, guitar…) can add a lot of realism to your sequences! Now open the MIDI file "guitar_short_demo.mid" in your sequencer, and load "guitar_short.gig" in Gigasampler. If you open a piano roll window, you will notice that BEFORE every note event I assigned a random CC1 event. In this way the guitar line (sorry about the music, but I found this tune very instructive!) become very "real", just because two adjacent notes will never sound the same (i.e. will never trigger the same sample). You have also an example about changing, in a simple way, from the "short" note to the "muted" note, simply by setting the note velocity to 127. For cakewalk users, I included also a small CAL script, "random controller values.cal". If you select a MIDI track and then run the script, this will insert, before every note event, a random controller value (in this case CC1), useful for changing the sample triggered by that note (as discussed before).
Files:
Snare dynamics.gig
Bass Slap.gig
Guitar short.gig
Guitar short demo.mid
Random Controller Values.CAL
(cakewalk CAL script)
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