Choked E-Guitar Chords.

[electro]

More.

http://www.cyberfret.com/styles/funk/10 ... uted_16.rm

http://www.cyberfret.com/styles/funk/101/index.php

[Markleford]

Yeah, that "Funk Guitar 101" describes it pretty well. The quote near the beginning really has it clear:

At first don't even worry about playing a chord, just mute the strings with you left hand and just get a clicking sound. In fact, a funk guitar part could consist of only this clicking sound, making the guitar more of a percussion instrument.

As with any percussion sample, you generally want several variations of samples to randomize/alternate between to capture the human factor. Just as a hand or stick never hits a drum head in the same place, the angle and direction of a guitar-pick against a string is always different from the last strike (and the "tightness" of the players mute with the left hand is also varied slightly).

On top of that you can add a wah-wah effect for even more variety, as Sascha did. This is a classic sound for much 70's funk.

I don't know if any library has ever captured the *totality* of guitar playing. It would never be "complete". I suppose that's why we still have guitar players in the world... well, besides the fact that the guitar is really fun to play because of that same breadth of expression!

- m

[electro]

The real question is this? Can notes be choked individually for sampling purposes, and then played back together to get a choked chords sound?

[Sascha Franck]

The real question is this? Can notes be choked individually for sampling purposes, and then played back together to get a choked chords sound?

No - at least we're not there yet.
A) The sound of an individually choked/muted note is way different than what you get from muting a bunch of them.
B) As a result of this, as soon as you combine those single notes to a chord, they won't sound like what it would sound like in case it was played as a chord in the first place.

For those very reasons the content of plugins such as virtual guitarist is sampled differently than your "normal" sample library.
"Under the hood" you will find the same pattern for each and every chord, then recycled (or sliced in whatever way).
That's also one of the reasons why the chord possibilities in virtual guitarist are somewhat limited - it'd just take an IMMENSE amount of samples (and therefor work and HDD space) to capture each chord with almost each rhythm (even if you could eventually limit the sampled rhythms and rebuild them from the sliced stuff, which is what I did to some extent in my example).

Your best bet would perhaps be to sample some muted only rhythms (without tonal information that is) and then add tonal information by using other samples.
Still, those additional samples would ideally have to be sampled as chords as a combination of sampled single notes won't result in the same chord sound as a sampled chord.

Basically the problem comes down to this:
Sampled individual notes = "chordal freedom" but less convincing sonic results.
Sampled chords = Authentic sound but no "chordal freedom", especially in case you want to use things in realtime.

Most likely a combination of those would give the best results - but realtime playability would defenitely still be a tough thing to implement (LOADS of modulations, keyswitches and whatever sample modifying techniques).

I'm really happy being able to lay down all my guitar parts myself - seems to be that most other instruments are easier to sample.

[Markleford]

The real question is this? Can notes be choked individually for sampling purposes, and then played back together to get a choked chords sound?

To an extent, yes. However, you would have to account for the "strum factor" when programming your sequence such that each of the individual notes in the chord is slightly after one another in time. Even the order of the notes would depend on the direction the pick was going, alternating per 16th note in the sequence.

I'll hopefully try to post some experiments soon to demonstrate some sampling possibilities and techniques. Busy trying to finish a film score at the moment...

- m

[z_old_account]

Some teaser for reFX Slayer 2.1 . Will be released within the next days.
Velocity controls if a chord is played chocked or non-chocked. This chords have been played live by one-finger-system (i'm no good keyboardist

www.obertone.com/Slayer_2.1_preview_(played_live).mp3

Cheers,
Markus

[Markleford]

Here's a bit of an experiment...

Guitar Funk Sample Test (415k)

The samples are coming from six different pools:

- Choke, strum down
- Choke, strum up
- Chord 1, strum down
- Chord 1, strum up
- Chord 2, strum down
- Chord 2, strum up

When a note is triggered, one sample is randomly played from the appropriate pool to keep the physical variance of a pick hitting the strings in different ways. Additionally, every other 16th note is taken from alternating down and up pools to simulate the strumming motion of a guitarist.

I decided to keep with sampling chords to reduce the computational complexity behind the timing offset of strumming individual note samples. The fact of the matter is, there are a handful of funk inversions that can cover a lot of ground towards a realistic performance, so it would be acceptable to stick to those.

As such, a performance for a funky-choked-chord VSTi could be managed by key-switching your chord inversion with your left hand and doing your "strumming" with your right hand. The strumming would be accomplished by creating an octave-divide where the low note would be the down-stroke and the high note would be the up stroke.

To end up, here's a bit of algorithmically generated funk:

Guitar Funk Random (343k)

Needs to be reeled in a bit, as it gets a bit spazzy at times (e.g. you can't really swap between the sustained chord inversions that quickly), but you get the idea.

Now I must get back to the soundtrack I'm supposed to be writing: I've been sidetracked quite enough on this little experiment!

- m

[Cheeso]

If you're talking about funk guitar, run a guitar vst or samples through an Auto Wah VST effect. I know I've downloaded at least one free one, if I can track it down, I'll post the name of it here.

[TheWall]

Markleford, that sounds great. It's pretty much exactly the same idea as SI's funk guitar soundfont(has anyone bothered to check the link I posted in a previous post? ). But if you make a free-4-all one with such a great sound, it'll surely give them a run for their money.

Oh, btw, SI's soundfonts use velocity-layer to trigger chug/open1/open2, assigned to two scales - one for strum up and one for strum down.

EDIT: just want to stress it again your demo sounds really good, and has a very different flavor to the SI soundfont. Can't wait to see you finish it.

[Markleford]

Markleford, [...] just want to stress it again your demo sounds really good, and has a very different flavor to the SI soundfont.

Thanks. Yeah, it's bound to be a bit different: it uses sounds from my guitar, and models how *I* play funk rhythm guitar! Modelling another player would come up with different results.

I'm now toying with a different idea for a performance mode. Since the output is most often constant 16th notes (with a bit of swing/shuffle), why not trigger it like an arpeggiator? Press one note to determine the base key you're in, and then hold another to determine what chord inversion or choke style you're currently playing. The instrument would handle the up/down stum alternations automatically, and you could even dial in a bit of randomness to tell it how often to substitute a held chord with a choke.

Can't wait to see you finish it.

I only wish I had the time! Or else I need to start contracting programmers to do it on the side, but I'm afraid this sort of instument has limited appeal and wouldn't get me my money back.

But perhaps someday when the majority of my other projects are put to bed.

- m

[TheWall]

I'm now toying with a different idea for a performance mode. Since the output is most often constant 16th notes (with a bit of swing/shuffle), why not trigger it like an arpeggiator? Press one note to determine the base key you're in, and then hold another to determine what chord inversion or choke style you're currently playing. The instrument would handle the up/down stum alternations automatically, and you could even dial in a bit of randomness to tell it how often to substitute a held chord with a choke.

I only wish I had the time! Or else I need to start contracting programmers to do it on the side, but I'm afraid this sort of instument has limited appeal and wouldn't get me my money back.

- m

That sounds great! Probably would be of commercial value if combined with that that YAMAHA EZ-Guitar thingy (great video demo btw ) as a bundle.

[Markleford]

Whipped up another demo today (when I *should* be finishing my film score!):

http://www.markleford.com/music/tmp/mar ... t-fast.mp3

Both the drums and guitar are algorithmically tweaked by drawing envelopes in SONAR to contour the performance (aka "Guitar, choke chords less", "Drums, you get spazzy here" )

As for directing this toward the Yamaha EZ-Guitars, it's a very interesting concept...

- m

[electro]

Any VSTIs on the horizon?

[Rellik]

Whipped up another demo today (when I *should* be finishing my film score!):

http://www.markleford.com/music/tmp/mar ... t-fast.mp3

Both the drums and guitar are algorithmically tweaked by drawing envelopes in SONAR to contour the performance (aka "Guitar, choke chords less", "Drums, you get spazzy here" )

As for directing this toward the Yamaha EZ-Guitars, it's a very interesting concept...

- m

Woah... an extremely cool piece of music, there!

[Markleford]

Any VSTIs on the horizon?

Not quite yet: still a mountain of stuff above it on my to-do list!

I seriously need to find a way to cut some corners if I'm going to do it. Was thinking about licensing Rene's sfz engine before NAMM, but now that he's been picked up by Cakewalk I doubt he'll have such leeway to make those kinds of deals.

- m