Last night I was talking with Voodoo Shilton as I was very impressed by the authenticity of the saxophone he was playing as I know he doesn't play sax and yet the sound of it had all of the nuance of a live instrument. You will have to hear his live set, preferably at Cat's Art MusikCircus, to fully appreciate what I mean.
Note: Voodoo Shilton sells recordings he makes of each of his sets. Each one is a value as every set he does is different. I was going to drop a link to where you could get one but then it dawned that I don't know if that's possible. I must ask as that seems quite a good thing to put on his Artist Profile on the MusikCircus Web page.
So I talked with Voodoo about how he gets the ultra-sexy saxophone sound and he told me Kontakt. At first that didn't click but then I recalled Native Instruments and software I have used from them previously. If you already know how that goes, here's a link to third-party samples for the Kontakt synth. (As to which samples he uses, you will have to ask him that yourself as that's Voodoo magic.)
There are two general ways to get sound out of a synth: one is through the synth hardware in the way Chordslinger Carstenz does it and the second is that you can use the keyboard as a controller and the synthesis takes place on another device or a computer. Kontakt is the latter solution as it runs on an Apple platform (possibly PC as well but I don't know that). In this way, you play a note on the keyboard and that information is transmitted to the computer via MIDI where it figures out what sound to make and that goes on out to the amplifier.
Note: Chordslinger is back after some substantial medical stuff and he is recording again. As I said to him, the song he sent me is mainstream but it's not the mainstream rubbish I love to slam. I'll refer again to it in just a bit.
In music synthesis, there are two general ways to do that too: either the synthesizer actually does 'synthesize' the sound using various clever algorithms or it loads the sound for any given note from a 'sample library' for that particular instrument. Which is the best is something to leave for musicologists as our interest here is sampling because that's what Voodoo was doing.
Sampling came after the original Moog and similar type synthesizers as all of those were algorithmic. What sampling permitted was the use of any sound source whatsoever. For example, you could record a 'sample' of an F40 Ferrari accelerating and use that in a synth. For highly accurate sampling, one records a sample for every pitch but sampling synthesizers can also pitch-shift a single sample to use it at any pitch. In that way you could play "Chopsticks" only with the sound of an F40 Ferrari for each note. How that might work we leave to the particularly-demented student to discover.
So, what motivated all of this is that the saxophone Voodoo was playing seriously kicked ass. Plus he wasn't just trying to use the synth to whack out some chords so he could overlay that with some dazzling guitar work. Instead he was really playing it and he wasn't playing it in a linear way as one will often hear from keyboard players. The keyboard is linear therefore all scales shall be played in a linear way but most instruments aren't even close to linear. Voodoo was playing some very cool sax jams and the fundamental sound (i.e. the sample) was killin' accurate plus the way he was playing it was highly-authentic. Obviously I was impressed!
Where Chordslinger comes back into this is that he doesn't do any of it. All of his synthesis is in hardware but, just as Voodoo doesn't really play a sax, Chordslinger doesn't really play a guitar and yet the guitar sounds he had in his latest recording were similar to what Voodoo was doing. The authenticity of the samples was stunning and he was playing it the way a guitarist would rather than the way a keyboard player would do it.
The conclusion is that going with hardware or software sampling really doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of difference. You go with whatever you play best.
Note: There are some drawbacks to the computer solution and they do need some consideration.
1) Native Instruments has the most annoying security on their software of any vendor I have ever encountered. You practically have to give the software fingerprints, blood, and a retinal scan before it will recognise you as the rightful owner.
2) Using the computer means you need adequate compute power or it will not be able to keep up with what you are playing. Music synthesis is right behind video for the most compute-intensive thing a computer can be required to do so make sure your machine has the muscle or you will invariably be disappointed.
Note: Voodoo Shilton sells recordings he makes of each of his sets. Each one is a value as every set he does is different. I was going to drop a link to where you could get one but then it dawned that I don't know if that's possible. I must ask as that seems quite a good thing to put on his Artist Profile on the MusikCircus Web page.
So I talked with Voodoo about how he gets the ultra-sexy saxophone sound and he told me Kontakt. At first that didn't click but then I recalled Native Instruments and software I have used from them previously. If you already know how that goes, here's a link to third-party samples for the Kontakt synth. (As to which samples he uses, you will have to ask him that yourself as that's Voodoo magic.)
There are two general ways to get sound out of a synth: one is through the synth hardware in the way Chordslinger Carstenz does it and the second is that you can use the keyboard as a controller and the synthesis takes place on another device or a computer. Kontakt is the latter solution as it runs on an Apple platform (possibly PC as well but I don't know that). In this way, you play a note on the keyboard and that information is transmitted to the computer via MIDI where it figures out what sound to make and that goes on out to the amplifier.
Note: Chordslinger is back after some substantial medical stuff and he is recording again. As I said to him, the song he sent me is mainstream but it's not the mainstream rubbish I love to slam. I'll refer again to it in just a bit.
In music synthesis, there are two general ways to do that too: either the synthesizer actually does 'synthesize' the sound using various clever algorithms or it loads the sound for any given note from a 'sample library' for that particular instrument. Which is the best is something to leave for musicologists as our interest here is sampling because that's what Voodoo was doing.
Sampling came after the original Moog and similar type synthesizers as all of those were algorithmic. What sampling permitted was the use of any sound source whatsoever. For example, you could record a 'sample' of an F40 Ferrari accelerating and use that in a synth. For highly accurate sampling, one records a sample for every pitch but sampling synthesizers can also pitch-shift a single sample to use it at any pitch. In that way you could play "Chopsticks" only with the sound of an F40 Ferrari for each note. How that might work we leave to the particularly-demented student to discover.
So, what motivated all of this is that the saxophone Voodoo was playing seriously kicked ass. Plus he wasn't just trying to use the synth to whack out some chords so he could overlay that with some dazzling guitar work. Instead he was really playing it and he wasn't playing it in a linear way as one will often hear from keyboard players. The keyboard is linear therefore all scales shall be played in a linear way but most instruments aren't even close to linear. Voodoo was playing some very cool sax jams and the fundamental sound (i.e. the sample) was killin' accurate plus the way he was playing it was highly-authentic. Obviously I was impressed!
Where Chordslinger comes back into this is that he doesn't do any of it. All of his synthesis is in hardware but, just as Voodoo doesn't really play a sax, Chordslinger doesn't really play a guitar and yet the guitar sounds he had in his latest recording were similar to what Voodoo was doing. The authenticity of the samples was stunning and he was playing it the way a guitarist would rather than the way a keyboard player would do it.
The conclusion is that going with hardware or software sampling really doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of difference. You go with whatever you play best.
Note: There are some drawbacks to the computer solution and they do need some consideration.
1) Native Instruments has the most annoying security on their software of any vendor I have ever encountered. You practically have to give the software fingerprints, blood, and a retinal scan before it will recognise you as the rightful owner.
2) Using the computer means you need adequate compute power or it will not be able to keep up with what you are playing. Music synthesis is right behind video for the most compute-intensive thing a computer can be required to do so make sure your machine has the muscle or you will invariably be disappointed.
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