Hi folks,

The question might look "trivial", but let's say I want to sample a piano at 10 velocity layer. How will I find a "player" who can play at 10 "equal" velocity levels? Maybe for piano a machine could be built for that purpose but what about other acoustic instruments?

Any feedback would be appreciated!

Thanks!

Bulent

Pro sample developers like Sampletek use machines for this purpose.

The other approach is to record many hits over the full range of velocities and then rank them according to peak level or RMS level or whatever you prefer. Make a selection from your collection of hits to make up the final set.

you could assemble some robots with a couple of arduinos and servos

egbert's about right, I reckon. Get someone who's good at playing an instrument and they'll have good dynamic control over it. That's a great starting point. Them get them to play from ppp to fff in their natural style, capturing lots of samples (stop before you want to kill each other / yourself). Rank them into appropriate groups of about the same level and pick the ones you want to keep. Then decide if you want to normalise them or leave them...

I had the exact idea! Sorting makes a lot of sense!

Some programmers have automated this sort process. BFD does this automatically - as I understand it, it ranks the sample pool available on the hard-drive according to level. This allows it to deal with whatever sample depth the user has chosen to install and this scheme is robust when samples are added or removed by updates etc.

Another KVR guy actually had Perl scripts to chop long wav files into separate hits and then perform this sort/rank procedure (was that LearJeff?) - pretty slick workflow in any case