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FAYder · Post by **FAYder** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 3:20 pm

William, congratulations on Knagalis, it produces wonderfully authentic examples of World instruments. I'm glad you didn't name the bagpipe anything like Celtic .. the Celtic people lived all over Europe not just in Ireland

!!!! And, there is French, Spanish and Bulgarian bagpipe music to be found. Celtic = Irish or Scottish only = WRONG.

My interest in World music comes from my anthropology background. Now, to non-Oriental ears, the Knagalis sitar sounds authentic. I am curious to know what research you have done to make sure the sounds are authentic. For instance, were the sitar sounds played to any Indian musicians during testing?

Thanks in advance.

kpr · Post by **kpr** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 6:44 pm

FAYder wrote:William, congratulations on Knagalis, it produces wonderfully authentic examples of World instruments. I'm glad you didn't name the bagpipe anything like Celtic .. the Celtic people lived all over Europe not just in Ireland !!!! And, there is French, Spanish and Bulgarian bagpipe music to be found. Celtic = Irish or Scottish only = WRONG.

My interest in World music comes from my anthropology background. Now, to non-Oriental ears, the Knagalis sitar sounds authentic. I am curious to know what research you have done to make sure the sounds are authentic. For instance, were the sitar sounds played to any Indian musicians during testing?

Thanks in advance.

Hi, Klaus P. Rausch here from Back In Time Records. We´re sample provider for many instruments of Dashsignature products and of course for EMM Knagalis too. We´re recording ethnic instruments for sample products since 1995 and, like you, we´ve did a lot of research to make everything right in naming the instruments and find out the origins of them. And we´ve realized, that some instrument types are found on more than just one place on earth but in different variation. To get the customers of VST and sample products more informations than just the pure samples we provide "Making of ..." articles and features. Some of them are on our Website www.backintimerecords.de, others in related magazines.

Concerning the players: In most cases the players are from the countries, where the instruments are common. Fortunately we´re located in Germany, a nation with so many cultures and people from dozens of countries. Sometimes we´re hiring musicians with the ability to play more than only one instrument. So it was with the Sitar. Actually it is a very good Acoustic Guitar player, who also performed the Buzouki and the Sitar as well as some other string instruments you can find in our Sample Libraries. Be sure that many of them will be released in Dashsignature products soon.

FAYder · Post by **FAYder** » Fri Oct 03, 2003 7:57 pm

Thank you Klaus, I can't even use web translation to translate those articles from German as the web pages are images (something like PDF). I look forward to reading the English versions.

It is interesting to know that Knagalis uses played recorded samples, I thought it was pure synthesis creating the sounds. I have read the logic behind Knagalis and beyond the "three layers" of sound it wasn't so clear to me that it uses actual recordings, although it is obvious that some synthesis is involved in creating some of the sounds.

I really look forward to more DashSignature VSTs with World themes.

liqih · Post by **liqih** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 2:18 am

thanks for the comment FAYder, as designer of EMM
I can add some info about it:

the design on EMM went thru many experiments to find
a compromise between the real world of complex intruments,
like sitar, and the limited possibilities of samples controlled
by a MIDI keyboard. From there the idea to design a soft synth
which features a monophonic part to allow legato and portamento
performance, supported by a polyphonic layer to cover the
the obvious hole left by the single note playing of the monophonic part.

So a special set of recorded samples is used,
samples from real instruments have been edited too,
equalized and other trasformations used, to have
them building up a good ensemble when the three layers
of Knagalis are used.

After the release of EVE we'll be working on a new
bank of samples for EMM, including more interesting instruments.

FAYder · Post by **FAYder** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 12:25 pm

The Orient, Near East and Africa have been well covered by many sample libraries. What is not well covered is the instruments from the indigenous American people, such as Aztec, Maya and North American nations .. this would be fresh

Joris Vincken · Post by **Joris Vincken** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 12:51 pm

FAYder you say the orient has been well covered. I've been searching all over the internet for a good Tampura sample series, but haven't found them yet. The Knagalis is ok, but there is only 1 scale and transposing is just speeding up/slowing down the samples.

Klaus, it says on your website that there is a demo version of Ethnosphere, but all I can find are some mp3 demos.

WilliamK · Post by **WilliamK** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 6:12 pm

Joris Vincken wrote:The Knagalis is ok, but there is only 1 scale and transposing is just speeding up/slowing down the samples.

Sorry, but what you mean by one scale only?

Also, about the samples, any other product will work like that ,including Ethnosphere, wich has FEWER options compared to EMM...

Regards, WilliamK

pough · Post by **pough** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 7:02 pm

I have both Ethnosphere and EMM. I'm really not impressed with Ethnosphere's samples and the way they use them. There are notes that take a few seconds to fade in because they're just samples that are WAY slowed down. I emailed them with a big list of critiques and so far (about 5 months) I have not received any response from them.

I posted my notes here.

Joris Vincken · Post by **Joris Vincken** » Sat Oct 04, 2003 9:06 pm

William I mean with 1 scale that the tampura in Knagalis is only tuned in c/g (western names), but sometimes a tampura is also tuned c/f.

I'm actually searching a multisampled instrument with maybe a few diffent keys and speeds.

kpr · Post by **kpr** » Sun Oct 05, 2003 2:46 pm

pough wrote:I have both Ethnosphere and EMM. I'm really not impressed with Ethnosphere's samples and the way they use them. There are notes that take a few seconds to fade in because they're just samples that are WAY slowed down. I emailed them with a big list of critiques and so far (about 5 months) I have not received any response from them.

I posted my notes here.

Hi, Klaus from Back In Time Records here. I don´t want to talk too much about Ethnosphere in the Dashsignature forum, but we´re the sample content provider of Ethn´s AND EMM Knagalis. I´ve didn´t know before about your full length sample comments, wow, it´s an impressive work and you should be on our beta-tester list. The VST product´s features are not our issue, but the samples are. I can say that Ethnosphere and EMM have pretty different concepts and EMM is more sophisticated in all the parameters and performance features. Concerning sample "jumps" you should consider original instruments. When playing the strings on a plucked instrument you´ll notice a difference between them, and this is as it is. But this is not all, it depends on the played scale too. Surely it´s possible to create more consistence over the keyboard, and this would be just a favour for some Keyboard Players, not to the original instrument character. Actually it´s possible to provide both, but this will increase the MB amount of samples very quickly in really huge dimensions. Maybe you should watch the further development of EMM Knagalis (Pro-Version) ...

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Knagalis Ethnic Research?