String Cyborgs are here. Hide your humans.

[DSmolken]

Edit: available now at http://www.karoryfer.com/karoryfer-samp ... ng-cyborgs

Some of you may remember that among the Karoryfer libraries of various instruments there were a few weird synth-like things made from bowed string samples - Ironface and Blackheart. A few of you even helped by making presets for one of them. Those of you who pay way too much attention to our weird descriptions might even know that they were named after very fashionable-looking killer droids from an Albert Pyun movie, and there were three in the movie with the third one being named Zinc.

Well, I've finally gotten around to making Zinc, and also redoing the first two with a proper GUI, more controls, more features, and generally almost everything redone from the ground up. Unfortunately this means the Blackheart presets everyone made have been lost, as things are now voiced quite differently, and Plogue also added a new preset management system in the meantime. But they both sound much better (especially Ironface who gets an extra new distorted voice), and Zinc is even more sophisticated, being based on samples recorded specifically for the purpose of making her.

This is the GUI.



And here is a track where I've used all three. The plucked bass is Zinc and Blackheart. The wobbly sustained bass is Zinc, Ironface and a synthesized sine wave during the chorus. A third instance of Zinc is used to play only one swishy note at the very end. I also used Growlybass, two instances of Weresax and two of Shinyguitar in there, for a total of 10 instances of Sforzando.



We plan to publish this tomorrow - basically just waiting for one of the other Karoryfer guys to make a proper demo. This really means a lot to me - the whole reason I got into sampling a few years ago is because I wanted to find a way to make the sound of me playing my double bass properly usable in electronic music. I started on Ironface in October 2014.

And no, I didn't make that gingerbread. The singer did.

[DSmolken]

All right, here they are:

http://www.karoryfer.com/karoryfer-samp ... ng-cyborgs

And a silly demo. Better demo coming... we need to show off how nice long evolving sounds can be.

https://soundcloud.com/karoryfersamples ... y-habanera

[bigcat1969]

I had no idea you could do all that in SFZ. I have no idea what I'm doing but its a lot of fun.

[DSmolken]

Most of it is really basic SFZ 1.0, like MIDI CC adjustable filter cutoffs. For example the screech parameter on the vibrato LFO is basic, it affects the volume of everything in the screech oscillator groups. The interesting part is that it has a negative effect while the volume affects both the pitched and noise oscillators with a positive number. So you can make the screech noise get louder while the note gets quieter. That's just something I came up with doing Weresax and trying to imitate the way breath noise works in slow sax vibrato, but as far as the opcodes used go it's really basic stuff.

The big unison sound is really basic opcodes, too. The center voice uses the nearest available sample to play the note, and the other voices use higher samples shifted down. Each voice has a different random offset for the sample playback point, which basically randomizes the phase relationship between the voices. Again, basic opcodes, just used for an unusual purpose.

Some of it does use SFZ 2.0 or ARIA extensions, like LFO03 affecting the frequency of LFO01 and LFO02, or the velocity tracking using an extended MIDI CC number for the velocity and multiplying that by the knob setting. I just built this by learning about new functions one step at a time over a period of time. You can compare this to Cowsynth and see how simple the beginnings were. David and Eric from Plogue have been very helpful.

[DSmolken]

And here's the better demo made by my friend Ludwik Zamenhof, who also did our lovely cello demo and was involved in recording some of these samples.

https://soundcloud.com/karoryfersamples ... borgs-demo

[SampleScience]

Very interesting project. I didn't know it was possible to make GUI this complex in Sforzando. I've downloaded the library and I'm going to try it out. It sounds good!

[DSmolken]

The GUI is pretty simple XML files that map the PNG graphics to MIDI CC controls - you can take a look in the GUI folder, I think I might even have some comments there. The GUI functionality was created for commercial developers, but Plogue are willing to make that functionality available for some free instruments. You can also do horizontal/vertical sliders, display current parameter values etc. The knobs are made with the free JKnobMan application, as were the bigger/fancier knobs in the earlier GUI-equipped libs, including the bloody eyeballs for Scarypiano.



You've made some free plugins with MaizeSampler recently, I think? This could be a good alternative.

[SampleScience]

You've made some free plugins with MaizeSampler recently, I think? This could be a good alternative.

Yes, and I have another free plugin coming up this week. I already use XML files with Maize so the leap to Sforzando shouldn't be to hard to make. We'll see! What's important to me is stability and easy of use. The easier it is to use the better.

[DSmolken]

Sure, you can check out ease of use with these. It's pretty much like any synth with controls on the GUI and mapped to MIDI CC. The only ease of use negative is that emptying the instrument from Sforzando before loading the next preset works better - I think some of the presets used some controls set to default values (like attack=0) and the preset file doesn't set this explicitly.

Stability and performance seem very good - when testing we've also done even more unison voices per note, played big fat ten-finger chords to get more than a hundred LFOs going at once, and things were fine.

[DSmolken]

Now over 1000 downloads, which is really nice - it took the earlier versions of Ironface and Blackheart libraries months to reach 1000 downloads, and this was a week and a half. I guess with this type of instrument a GUI makes a huuuuge difference in ease of use.

And here's a track where I used Zinc for bass during the chorus and bridge - the verse bass is Swagbass, and a ton of our other libraries also get used. The cello we made with bigcat, the Nathan Sheeran drums (though as a secondary layer, main drum layers are Rattly And Raw Martin France Drums), Weresax, Cowsynth, Shinyguitar...