Electri6ity

[skank]

Hi everyone,
I just wanted to let you know that a lot of new demos are online now:

Electri6ity: Medley of Famous Riffs and Solos (HD)


Electri6ity: Tele (Crazy) Funk Solo Demo (HD)


Electri6ity: LP Chopin Op. 10 No. 9 Variation Legato Demo (HD)


Electri6ity: 335 and L4 Jazzy Demo (HD)


Electri6ity: Stratocaster Front Pickup Paganini (HD)


Electri6ity: Stratocaster Rear Pickup Paganini (HD)


I hope you'll like them!

Please could you point me to, or post some more demos without fx, instrumentation etc. so we can hear the raw samples. Would be greatly appreciated, for me anyway it's difficult to really hear detail with so much going on.

/Skank

[Arglebargle]

Hi everyone,
I just wanted to let you know that a lot of new demos are online now:

Electri6ity: Medley of Famous Riffs and Solos (HD)


Electri6ity: Tele (Crazy) Funk Solo Demo (HD)


Electri6ity: LP Chopin Op. 10 No. 9 Variation Legato Demo (HD)


Electri6ity: 335 and L4 Jazzy Demo (HD)


Electri6ity: Stratocaster Front Pickup Paganini (HD)


Electri6ity: Stratocaster Rear Pickup Paganini (HD)


I hope you'll like them!

damn!!!! I may have to revise my long held opinion that it's impossible to do realistic distorted guitar samples!

[dynamitec]

Have you listend to all the blues demos on the last page (Page 2)? They are guitar only (no other instruments). What kind of demos are you looking for?

[K-Slash]

Sounds good, but still waiting for the amp-sim'ed demos.

I vote for AmpliTube 3, Vandal or TH1 .

[dynamitec]

Hi Slash,

The last rhythm guitar demo was done with Guitar Rig 4. But for high gain amps there are better alternatives, I know!

The three you named are one of the most realistic...unfortunately I don't have them.

[skank]

Have you listend to all the blues demos on the last page (Page 2)? They are guitar only (no other instruments). What kind of demos are you looking for?

Hey thanks, that is better, our rock is more indie / pop / mor etc but anyway as mentioned it's better, as we got a better idea of it. Cleaner less distortion would be cool, just to hear it raw, or just amp'd no dist though.

Thanks.

[K-Slash]

Have you listend to all the blues demos on the last page (Page 2)? They are guitar only (no other instruments). What kind of demos are you looking for?

Hey thanks, that is better, our rock is more indie / mor etc but anyway as mentioned it's better, as we got a better idea of it. Cleaner less distortion would be cool, just to hear it raw, or just amp'd no dist though.

Thanks.

+1, some clean amped tones could be great, and through GR4 would sound great as IMHO for clean tones and effects it's an awesome sim.

[P.T.]

Hi Slash,

The last rhythm guitar demo was done with Guitar Rig 4. But for high gain amps there are better alternatives, I know!

The three you named are one of the most realistic...unfortunately I don't have them.

Since you are a developer they might give you courtesy copies if you ask. Though I am more interested in how it sounds out of the box and with the better freeware amp sims like Acme Bar Gig and Le Poule.

Some samples sound very good through these and some samples do not.
The way the samples are recorded makes a very big difference.

Also, did you sample the Strat middle pick up?
The Middle/Bridge and Middle/Neck are very distinctive Strat sounds that are found all over pop music.

[dynamitec]

Tech-Demo 1: Strumming - why special articulations are necessary:

Since the discussion came up in another thread I wanted to post it here in the Electri6ity thread as well.

Electri6ity has a powerful strum engine.

But what does this mean? First of all, every articulation which can be strummed was sampled in two ways: picked and strummed, since there is a big timbre difference if you pick a single note or you strumm a chord.

If you strum a chord you'll also get typical strum noises (e.g. the plectrum hitting the next string, before it is played), which we captured carefully and correctly simulate while playing.

Most of the time if you strum chords quickly on a guitar, you slightly change the position you hit the different strings (starting on the neck and moving a little bit in the direction of the bridge while the strum happens for example). You can setup and modulate this strum angle in Electri6ity and you can automatically humanize it.

The next big key to realism is sympathetic resonace. This means that open strings are resonating to the frequency of the played strings, which produces a richer, fuller tone.

Since the question came up how Electri6ity sounds clean, I'm going to post some technical examples (they contain no music . This is the DI sound straight out of Electri6ity. So here is a demonstration of the timbre difference between vertical strumming (plectrum held more vertical/soft) and horizontal strumming. Demonstrated with four different velocity strengths - remember you can morph from soft to loud notes in Electri6ity.

Horiziontal Strum (softer, more mellow timbre):
http://www.benjaminstelzer.de/demo_new/ ... umming.mp3
http://www.benjaminstelzer.de/demo_new/ ... rySlow.mp3

Vertical Strum (brighter timbre):
http://www.benjaminstelzer.de/demo_new/ ... umming.mp3
http://www.benjaminstelzer.de/demo_new/ ... rySlow.mp3

Funk Strumming (guitar only):
[mp3]http://www.benjaminstelzer.de/demo_new/ ... nktest.mp3[/mp3]

I'm really sorry that my 'musical' demos don't show such things. As I already mentioned, I'm a developer not a great musician (like Greg, how can play great and interesting demos!). But new demos from 'real' musicians will come pretty soon and will show the full spectrum of what Electri6ity is capable to do!

[dynamitec]

Hi everyone,

the new http://www.vir2.com website is online now! Check it out for more infos about Electri6ity!

[K-Slash]

Hi everyone,

the new http://www.vir2.com website is online now! Check it out for more infos about Electri6ity!

Hey,

What a nice new website. I like it so much better than the old one.

That said, I contacted Vir2 to suggest some highly detailed electric basses and acoustic guitars libraries as Electri6ity.

Looks so detailed and so playable at the same time...

Would dream of enhanced BASiS and Acoustic Legends HD !

[benjamind]

That's what I was hoping for, that they'd also cover the basses and acoustics.

Well, I'm sure with time they will. Now that they've laid down the foundations with Electri6ity it's only a matter of time before they get the acoustic and basses worked out. I'm sure it won't be too hard now they've worked out the string selection artificial intelligence and fret logic which can be quite easily transferred to a 4 or 5 string bass without too much trouble. And I'm sure an acoustic would be dead simple as it's only a matter of preparing an acoustic sound set to simply replace the electric sound set, and it's pretty much done. The resonance part would be a little harder as they'd have to work out how to isolate the sound of the guitar from the guitar's body, but that wouldn't be too difficult seeing as they worked out a rather nice sympathetic resonance engine.

Ben

[dmichaelsmusic]

whoa! I'm sold after seeing this. I can't play keyboard quite that well but it's pretty amazing what this VI can do on the fly. Once I have the spare cash I will be all over electri6ity for sure. nicely done vir2.

[dynamitec]

Tech-Demo 2: Sympathetic Resonance - adding resonation to samples:

Hi everyone,

thanks for your kind comments! I'm glad you like Electri6ity so far.

In my first tech-demo above I described the difference between the strum and the picking articulations. I mentioned sympathetic resonance in that post.
So this time I want to show you the dynamic response of the Electri6ity's sympathetic resonance engine.

This is a very quickly sequenced rock riff with some faster single notes at the end (I didn't spent time on the programming btw. - no automation and only two keyswitches were used in the example and it didn't spent time de-quantizing it). It uses the automatic double tracking feature of Electri6ity however.

That's how the riff looks in piano roll view:


And that's how it sounds:

http://www.benjaminstelzer.de/demo_new/ ... chDemo.mp3

The next example is a rendering of the sympathetic resonance (SR) only:

http://www.benjaminstelzer.de/demo_new/ ... soOnly.mp3

As you can hear, the SR dynamically response to the playing. And only open strings are resonating. Muted notes also generate some resonation but almost not audible without an amp since your palm is muting the open strings most of the time as well.
Some libraries also have some kind of "resonation", but they mostly fake it with samples, which isn't quite satisyfing in my opinion.
Other libraries (mostly pianos for example) use a IR impulse to simulate the resonance. That's better, but that way you are still not able to simulate the correct behavior for a guitar, because only the open strings are resonating audible (of course the current played strings are also affeced by themselves and they are self resonating as well but that's a different topic and complex physical modelling is necessary for that).

Anyway, since Electri6ity SR is dynamically responsing to the playing, it makes bendings and vibratos much more realistic, since you can for example bend a string into or out of a resonance sweetspot for example.
And the Electri6ity SR also generates disharmonic resonance which is an important part of realism as well and often left out by engines which fake the resonance with samples. You can hear that in the demo above, too.

Stay tuned for more tech-demos

[dynamitec]

Tech-Demo 3: Why size sometimes matters

Hi everyone,

here is the next part of the tech-demos. In some threads I've read that people don't like advertising numbers when it comes to sample libraries. Most of the time I agree. For example: I don't care if a library contains 10.000 patches, if I only like one of them. I also don't care if it has 1.000.000 samples, if I can't use it because the learning curve is way to steep.

Buuut...sometimes the amount of samples and the size of a libray do matter.

Let's start with size:
Do you like a 30s sustain note with natural decay better than a 5s looped one? I do. At least when it comes to guitar or bass libraries. End of story

Let's talk about the amount of samples.

Of course I agree with everyone who says that the amount of samples doesn't tell you anything about the quality of a library. That's true. If a library however is carefully recorded and each of the samples is manually edited and you want to cover all important articulations, the sample count will rise. And in this case it makes sense. Electri6ity has a total amount of more than 200.000 samples but due to the new Kontakt 4 compression feature we were able to keep it <30GB (4 DL-DVDs - which should be a reasonable size).

The reason for the large amount of data is the concept behind Electri6ity: every articulation is sampled with the same detail.

For example: when we recorded a hammer on, we also recorded a muted hammer on. When we recorded a pull of we also recorded a muted pull off. Same for the single fret slides. Same for the noises.

Three words and another reason why more samples means better results in a lot of different cases: machine gun effect. Electri6ity allows VERY fast playing without the dreaded machine gun effect.

Here is a very simple example:

Here you can hear what it sounds like, if you eliminate all possible variations (except for down- and upstroke):

http://www.benjaminstelzer.de/demo_new/ ... inegun.mp3

And here is an example what it sounds like with those variations turned on again (Note: there is no manual variation like timing variation or different velocities. All notes are played hard quantized and with the same velocity to demonstrate the humanizing build into Electri6ity):

http://www.benjaminstelzer.de/demo_new/ ... nizing.mp3

Both examples are double tracked with Electri6ity's auto double tracking. So you can hear that it's always possible to have two 'virtual' guitarists playing together at any speed.

Stay tuned for more