Release sample triggering question

[Daniel78]

I just bought the PMI Old Lady Piano in the Sampletekk group buy and am very impressed with how it sounds. However, i'm using ProteusX2 and had to convert from the Giga2 file that i bought. Inevitably (as it seems to be with this sort of thing) some of the preset programming didn't come through correctly, and i've had to set it up myself (Which in a way is a good thing as i'm learning a whole bunch of stuff i didn't know before - and i'm new to sampler programming in general, so please excuse my n00b like questions!)

Anyway, my question is this... how do i get the release samples to trigger at the correct volume (If someone can help me with EmuX/ProteusX then great, but i'd also just like to know the general theory behind this). I have them triggered on key release (obviously) using the original note-on velocity, but if the main voice sample has faded to almost silence then the release samples are jarringly loud (ok, maybe not jarringly, but noticebably louder than they should be ). I don't seem to have anyway of knowing what level the main voice is at when the key is released (Since the ADSR is flat, and the fading is all in the sample)

Any advice?

[93143]

There are a couple of options. The obvious one is to use the Poly Key Timer source to attenuate the release sample. Experiment with using key number to modulate the speed of attenuation, so it will approximately track the decay times of the notes. If that fails, do it manually per note...

You could also (mind you I haven't tried this yet) try to modulate the Sample Start position with the key timer. Depending on the nature of the samples (the Nearly Upright has a lot of harmonics at the beginning of the releases; I don't know the Old Lady), this may save you a lowpass filter, as well as some polyphony as the sample dies faster.

Third, there's the brute force technique, in which you just forget you've got release triggering and pretend you're programming a soundfont. Add 64 samples of silence or so to the beginning of the release, loop it, and turn off Loop In Release. Now you can do whatever you want to the sample while the note is playing - i.e. all the envelopes work, etc. I haven't tested to see if you can alter the start point for a retrigger at key release, but that could be useful because you could combine Method 3 with Method 2...

[Daniel78]

thanks for the suggestions - i'll give them a go (i'm not sure ProteusX - as opposed to emuX - allows me to set loop points though, so i might not be able to try method 3). The manual actually suggested using the Poly Key timer for this sort of thing, but i couldn't get it to work... Do I just set it to the "decay" time, and route it to the Amp volume?
Thanks for the help - How's the Nearly Upright library coming along?


EDIT: I've realised i don't need to route Poly Key timer to anything. it seems to just work right away.

[93143]

Glad I could help.

It doesn't look like I can modulate Sample Start on key release like I thought, but I'm not entirely sure my installation of Emulator X isn't screwed up (I had Proteus X LE on my computer for a bit). I need to reinstall before I start programming my piano.

As for how the piano's going... I haven't posted an announcement of this, but two days ago the key samples (not including pedals, piano stool, and a couple of heavily filtered release resonances needed for partial pedaling) reached audio content lock. I still have to phase-align, pad and normalize, but those are batch operations in MATLAB and I've already got the scripts almost ready. Before programming the bank, the last major job is to figure out the pitch correction required by each note, so I can use CCs to control the tuning.

Do you happen to know of a good, robust tuner software that can handle heavily chorused sound and give a readout in cents?

[93143]

I just realized that 'Sample Start is one of the parameters that's set at note-on. I hoped this would be different for release trigger, but apparently it isn't...

At least Method 1 seems to be working for you...

[Daniel78]

Yeah, i'm still having a little trouble with the Poly Key Timer... Should i expect the volume to fade over the duration of the timer, or should it just drop to zero when it reaches the value i've set it to? (the latter seems to be what i'm seeing)

Also do you have any idea what the "Poly Key Release 2" (or something similar - the important part is the 2!) key modes do? It doesn't mention them in the manual.


Sorry, can't help with the tuning software. Good to hear the libray is coming along well though.

[93143]

Yeah, i'm still having a little trouble with the Poly Key Timer... Should i expect the volume to fade over the duration of the timer, or should it just drop to zero when it reaches the value i've set it to? (the latter seems to be what i'm seeing)

I just tried it in Emulator X v1.52, and if you route Poly Key Timer to Amp Volume at a negative cord value, the volume of the release is quieter if you hold the note longer. If the attenuation isn't fast enough, try routing the timer through 4x gain before sending it to the amp.

Wait, you can set a time? Or do you mean the cord amount?

Also do you have any idea what the "Poly Key Release 2" (or something similar - the important part is the 2!) key modes do? It doesn't mention them in the manual.

I don't know - it doesn't look familiar, and there are no twos in the Emulator X key mode dropdown. I'm holding off on upgrading because I want the piano to be backward compatible, so I haven't used Emulator X2 yet.

[Daniel78]

So after trying to get it to do anything (again) i realised i had to have "classic response" set to on. Otherwise i don't seem to get any attenuation at all (don't know if thats a bug or expected... but it seems a little weird).
So by routing it to Amp volume with a varying negative strength it looks like i can now change the attenuation rate. Thanks (I was previously setting the poly key timer knob at the preset level - but i guess that wouldn't let me chnage the attenuation on a per key basis anyway)

Yeah, so it looks like EmuX2 got a new (And apprently undocumented!) release key mode then... i'll have a play with it and see if i can tell what it does.

[93143]

So after trying to get it to do anything (again) i realised i had to have "classic response" set to on. Otherwise i don't seem to get any attenuation at all (don't know if thats a bug or expected... but it seems a little weird).

It is. Are you sure you're not just not waiting long enough? I'm not using "classic response", and it works here... It's good that it does work with Classic Response, though. If the rest of the piano sounds fine that way, go ahead and use it. (I really hope nothing got wrecked in the 2.0 update, though; I may need the key timer for my own piano...)

BTW, I found a program that does what I want. GTune. It shows note name, pitch in Hz, and tuning in cents, as well as having a handy bar display of how far off you are.

The middle C is maybe 28 cents flat. The low A is about (as a rough average) 205 cents flat...

[Daniel78]

It is. Are you sure you're not just not waiting long enough? I'm not using "classic response", and it works here... It's good that it does work with Classic Response, though. If the rest of the piano sounds fine that way, go ahead and use it. (I really hope nothing got wrecked in the 2.0 update, though; I may need the key timer for my own piano...)

So after playing around with a much simpler preset, and getting it to work correctly, it seems my problem is having the amp volume set above 0db. In this case setting classic response fixes it, but also makes everything quieter overall. (Maybe classic response has an upper limit of 0db for the amp?)
If i set the amp to 0db or lower, I can get Poly Key Timer to behave correctly without having classic response set.

[93143]

Cool. I forgot completely; I ran into that too while I was testing. The fix was the same (sorry)...

Anyway, I'm well on my way to getting the piano tuned. It's kind of brutal, because if you try to listen for beats you wind up with one of the strings in tune and the other two sharp. Bluedad's going to cringe when he hears my idea of A440 equal temperament - unless he listens to the original tuning first...

[Daniel78]

hehe, sounds like a lot of work. Though I think for piano like yours, entirely accurate tuning probably isn't essential anyway...

Another EmuX question (sorry!) . I can't seem to figure out how to trigger samples with the pedal (or anything other than the keyboard). The Old Lady comes with a bunch of pedal noises that would be kinda cool to hook up. I'm geussing its possible because you had pedal noises on one of your demo mp3s.

[93143]

Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to trigger a sample on CC, at least in Emulator X. I used MIDI-OX to add Note Ons/Note Offs below the keyboard when receiving pedal data. If you use Proteus X standalone, or if your host doesn't automatically hog all the virtual MIDI ports in your system (MIDI Yoke or Maple Virtual MIDI Cable or equivalent), you could play through MIDI-OX and have it do this, although if you're just playing back MIDI data from a file you'd have to re-record in order to be able to render, because MIDI-OX isn't a plugin.

If your pedal sends continuous data instead of acting as a switch, this method will sound a bit dumb, but I can't think of a way to fix that. Even sfz, which can trigger samples on CC, doesn't have a facility to prevent this. Most pedals send only 0 and 127, but there are oddballs...

If your host supports MIDI filtering and remapping, you should be able to duplicate this relatively simple functionality - just map CC to note with clone/pass-through. If not, there should be a plugin somewhere that can. (I think GOMP qualifies, but it's had some bad press around here and in any case it isn't free.) If there isn't anything, you could use these plugins to pull it off (I haven't tried them):

http://asseca.com/mgui/midixbar.html
http://asseca.com/nicfit/midifilter.html
http://asseca.com/nicfit/cc2cc.html
http://www.whiterabbitdesign.co.uk/subs ... usPACK.rar
http://www.niallmoody.com/ndcplugs/ndcmidi.htm (Channeliser)

Things get really complicated really fast if you want more than one pedal going, largely because SusON, from SusPACK.rar, appears to not work with anything but CC64. If your host won't let you do it natively, chances are good it won't let you do it this way either.

Just SusON by itself might be useful, though, and it would be much less of a pain to set up, provided it works in hosts other than eXT (or is that what you're using?). You'd just get the sustain pedal sounds, but how often do you use the other two anyway?

[Daniel78]

thanks for the help - looks like SusON should be enough for me to get it working in Tracktion. If not, i may end up writing a generic CC->note plugin myself.