I needed a week off from composing to rest my brain and decided to play around with sampling various stuff around the house like wine glasses, pots & pans, my wife singing, etc. and importing them into Alchemy since I have yet to mess with that aspect of it yet. The experience has simply been amazing! Just going through some of the presets and replacing the original material with my samples opens up a whole new world of creation. Ya, now I have to start tweaking Alchemy for my own personal sound, but in the meantime it's been so fun as a starting point.

I even took Bela D Media's Diva library, which I haven't touched in years since I bought it, converted a Kontakt patch into an SFZ file and then imported it into one of the Alchemy Dream Voices patches.....my God I've never heard DIVA sound so good. It's really opening the door for me in using old sample libs that have been sitting on my hard drive doing nothing for years, and wanting to sample anything and everything I can think of.

Thank you Camel Audio for giving me one of the most fun and inspirational last couple of days that I've had in a while. Alchemy rocks!!!

Yes you discovered the true nature of Alchemy!!

Great stuff quantum7, thanks for posting.

This might be really obvious but I've placed all of the K2/K3 converted SFZ files in categorised sub-folders of Alchemy/Samples/Kontakt for easy access on the Load Audio menu, with the actual samples referenced in the original Kontakt patch folders.




It's just one of many, but this is an excellent (and easy!) way to personalise the presets for your own music.

Peace,
Andy.

First 4 bars dry, 2nd 4 bars loaded into additive mode and tweaked around. This is why I love Techno.

http://soundcloud.com/digitalbeatsyndrome/pizm-9-7-11

it's awesome for doing transitions too! I like to take sounds that play sequentially and load them up in alchemy for some morphing. Automate a morph and layer it in at the appropriate point, sounds awesome.

It's good that you folks are getting something useful out of Alchemy. People are very positive about it generally it's true. I'd be intrigued to hear more examples of why you all rate it, particularly re: morphing/additive aspects.
You see, I bought it on a £80 special deal and still ended up selling it on.
I'd enthusiastically tried a demo months before, and thought: hmm... ok.
Then with improvements on the sound engine and the offer price decided to take a punt. After all; it must be me not getting the best out of it, right?
So, more hours/sessions were spent throwing samples at the morphing and additive sections but I just couldn't get anything that I liked out of it.
It must be just personal taste; to my ears the results sounded less than the some of their parts and (so often with additive synthesis) thin and 'zingy'.
I've been using hard/soft synths since before some of you were alive so I should be able to 'do it'. But, I'm happy to be shown where I'm going wrong... it's all (still) a learning process. Enlighten me!

Cheers.
JHUK

Yeah the additive engine takes a bit of experimenting to get right. I've thrown some bass sounds in there and like you said it just sounded thin and gross and frankly not usable. The manual says if it doesn't sound good then try adjusting the root note up or down an octave...and that did the trick for me. Say you've got a sample at B1 and load it in and it sounds thin...try it again but this time set root note to B0 and then tune the source down 12 semitones. To be honest I don't know why it works, I guess it has something to do with the analysis.

Oh also additive+spectral is good to use if the sound is kinda growly and noisy. But the main thing is to mess with the root note to get it sounding good. I'll try to post an example later.

it is an amazing sampler, especially with the morph.

A long while back when the Dirty Dose kits came out in SFZ form for use with Alchemy, I figured it would be a big hit.

but no one really seemed to care. LIttle did they know that some serious true power is hidden in the SFZ along with the midi to trigger and the the pad morph.

pretty sweet.

dw

Is there an easy/free way to convert a Kontakt patch into an SFZ file? I have that same Bela D Media Diva set, but would have no idea how to use it in Alchemy except by using the individual WAV files. I'm just not very familiar with the SFZ format. Also, it sounds like the converted files have to go into a specific location in order for the Alchemy browser to see them?

Thanks for any help.

Dan

Cheers padillac, well I look forward to hearing 'how it's done'. The shifting of root notes rings a bell... Coincidentally I used sets of instrument multi-samples at note pitches across an octave, so I was at least accidentally trying something similar. It's a while ago now, mind... And it was pretty hit and miss.
I had a moment of realisation when, after fighting with Alchemy to get something I liked... (and I was 'getting there')...it came to me that I could readily get the same type of noise by other means anyway! That was the clincher really. For instance, digitalbeatsynd's nice audio example above makes me think of oscillator-sync experiments. ...So if I wanted (generally) that kind of sound; I'd probably go a different route... It doesn't matter how you get there ultimately does it? ...But that doesn't help me 'get' Alchemy, the point of my enquiry!

Well, dusted william if you know of any online examples that have exposed the hidden magic, I'd like to hear them.

Cheers,
JHUK

i think using extreme sample converter is the simplest way to change formats.

Okay here's a little example. It's not great but I just threw it together in a few minutes. The example takes notes an octave apart and morphs one into the other.

http://patmaddox.s3.amazonaws.com/alchemy_bass_morph.aif

In order of appearance in the audio file:

1. sample 1 - bass note a1
2. sample 2 - bass note a0
3. sample 2 - additive, a0 root
4. sample 2 - additive, a-1 root (pitched down 12 semitones)
5. sample 2 - additive+spectral, a0 root
6. sample 2 - additive+spectral, a-1 root (pitched down)
7. morphing from sample 1 to sample 2 (example 1 to example 6)

sample 1 has absolutely no manipulation. sample 2 has a low-pass filter on it, modulated by an MSEG. I have another MSEG for sample 2's stretch to get some of that flappy sound at the end...and finally I use a third MSEG to morph between sample 1 and sample 2. And a little bit of distortion on the whole thing for good measure.

Like I said just a few minutes and not the greatest example…I had something that would illustrate it much better yesterday but I didn't save the patch and am not sure what samples I used. Anyway the point is you can hear the difference in the different import settings...there's a lot of noise in these samples so the additive doesn't really capture it, it sounds thin in example 3 and then just muddy in example 4. additive+spectral was a lot better.

This is just a really, really small example of morphing from one sound to another...what really gets me amped on alchemy is the modulation possibilities. I don't remember how many LFOs and MSEGs and other stuff you can have because I haven't hit the limit so far and then as I'm sure you know you can save different settings on the morph pads and then start transitioning in between them.

Also it's such a deep synth that I imagine everybody uses it a bit differently. I'd be really interested to see what other people come up with.






Yeah you're right it doesn't really matter how you get to the sound that you want. Often times when I'm messing with alchemy (and going way beyond the little example I posted) I end up with sounds that are waaaay different than anything I thought I would make. And that's another of alchemy's strong points. The VA, sampling, resynthesis and standard synth features let you program it in a predictable way if you want. Throw in the special features of granular / additive, and the modulations, and you can end up with stuff that's completely unpredictable but sounds great.

The full name of that programme is Extreme Sample Converter For Windows. So, not much use if you're on Macs.

Any similar converter for Mac OS?

/Joachim

i would also like to know the easiest way to convert kontakt libraries and files into sfz

I suggest Extreme Sample Converter on Windows or Chicken Systems Translator Pro on Mac. Links and more info here: http://www.camelaudio.com/SFZ-Player-Editor-Definition-Sampl es.php