Gigasampler Tutorial: Lesson 8
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In this lesson I will describe an acustic drum patch. The style is the same as lesson 7: I will describe why program the patch in this way and not how. These ideas are in part mine and in part learned on the net, while searching for sampling tips and tricks. You are naturally free to use them as you like, and i invite you to send your comments to me (positive or negative!)
The note A2 sound an hihat. While you keep the note pressed you will hear the sound of an "open hihat" with all its natural decay. But as soon as you release the note on your keyboard, it will be triggered a "closing hihat" sample. To obtain this effect i used the "release trigger" dimension, setting the "release trigger decay" to "slow", in order not to attenuate the closing hihat sample if the note is held for a long time. If you had set the "release trigger decay" to "fast", the volume of the closing hihat would be lower and lower as the note become held for long time (try to believe!). C3 is too an hihat. This time CC1 controls how the hihat is "open" by the foot of your virtual drummer. We sampled three different hihat aperture, assigning them to the different dimension splits.
Now, before going on, a little digression… As I say in lesson 7, one of the big problems in MIDI tracks trying to simulate real instruments is that when you have only one sample repeated many times you will get a very monotonous muiscal line (hihat, snare, guitar - see lesson 7). For this reason, it is not sufficient to have a single sample, even if it is a VERY good one, recorded perfectly. You have two ways: the first, you can sample many times a snare, an hat, or everything else (I've done that with my guitar in lesson 7). The second, you can "simulate" variations of the sound. I've found you can reach this result in two ways: by applying a filter or by varying a little the sample tuning. This is what I did in notes D3 and E3. In D3 I applied a low pass filter with maximum cutoff to 127 (= no filter applied) and minimum cutoff to 70 (perhaps is too low, but for this lesson it works!). moving the modwheel you can vary the harmonic content of your sample, simulating the different hits of the hat by a real drummer. I suggest you to try different minimum cutoff values and vary the velocity response curve of the filter. I would like to suggest that the filter envelope should be "flat": you should not hear any filter modulation. I suggest, for EG2, a rapid attack, maximum sustain and long release. In E3 I created a dimension with 4 splits, assigning it to the modwheel and with the same sample in every zone. For each different case I varied the fine tuning of the sample. I set it, in 5 cents intervals, from -10 to +5. You can create more splits (8 or 16) and change the detuning steps, even if I suggest not to exaggerate because a large tuning difference between two sample could even result ridiculous! I ended with F3, where I created a snare in which you can vary both the harmonic content with the low pass filter (CC1) and the tuning (CC16). The variations you can obtain are really a lot! The same tricks can be applied to crashes, hat, toms, kick drums, or every other sample you can imagine, the idea is always the same!
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