Breathy Trumpet
I agree it would be great to have ability to add breath or select different styles of sounds. The saxophones are developed on different synth technology, so it might have been easier to add there and more tricky here. I love the style slider on SWAM flute and wish all Sample Modelling instruments had it. Trumpet 3 did add ability to change harmonics and distance, but I agree breath noise and/or style option would be amazing.
I hope the developers are reading this and will consider it for future update
I hope the developers are reading this and will consider it for future update
Comments
Regarding a sound synthesis algorithm you (maybe by means of Kontakt scripting, by using NI Reaktor, or by a JSFX plugin when using Reaper (*) ) could try to multiply the output signal with a factor "1+n*filtered_noise signal" to add some breathiness with amount n. But I am not sure how realistic the sound would be nor if the Kontakt engine can do this.
Of course a completely new "breathy" sample set could nicely be handled by Kontakt. But this would be a lot of work for SM to record.
-Michael
(*) simply add an "amount" slider and a one-line calculation to the "pink noise" JSFX. Of course using a Midi CC for moving the amount slider would be easy as well. In a second step using an EQ for noise shaping could be considered: Pink Noise->ReaEQ->Multiplier JSFX.
If I find some spare time I might try to do the said "breathyness" JSFX plugin
we are well aware of the importance of getting a breathy sound, particularly when dealing with brass instruments. The task is an elusive one, though. A brass "breath" has little to do with the colored noise added by most synthesizers. Just try to add any type of noise to any less breathy trumpet sound, and you will soon realize that this noise does not integrate with the trumpet sound at all!
For the present version of the Trumpet 3 we would suggest the following:
Please keep in mind that a very breathy trumpet needs to be played pianissimo, or even sub-pianissimo, so that, when recording the real instrument, one needs to apply a lot of mic gain to maintain the presence of the instrument. To reproduce this breathy sound, the virtual instrument needs to be played that way - at the lowest dynamics (CC11/CC2 sometimes even below 10), low velocities, and very high gain. You will then discover that the sound is more breathy than you think... :-)
By the way, please note that our classic (harmonic alignment based) sample-modeling approach is still (in our humble opinion) the most advanced way of getting flexibility out of samples without screwing up the timbre. Other approaches may yield even more flexibility, but at the risk of sounding unrealistic and synthetic.
Regards
Peter & Giorgio
It also seems to be very easy to do a thingy that makes use of the EQ that comes with Reaper to color the distortion.
Unfortunately I don't have a Trumpet fort testing.
Kobi, could you provide a little solo Trumpet piece, that might benefit from artificial breathification, so that I can test the algorithm ? It should have a very soft and a loud part, as I suppose the plugin should automatically detect the volume of the input signal and reduce the amount of distortion with higher volume. (It also could directly use the expression midi CC, but right now I would like to stay with just doing audio).
-Michael
With CC11 below 10 there are only some 8 steps left for doing any articulation. This strongly asks for "High Resolution Midi" (using CC11 + CC43 in combination to define 14 Bits). Reaper can do this, but I don't know what hardware Breath / Wind controller can. I have a TEC BBC, that is a great beast but does not send High Resolution Midi. Also I don't know whether Kontakt supports 14 Bits, and obviously Trumpet is limited to what Kontakt offers. OTOH, I do have the Flutes and a future version of SM's own SWAM engine might be made recognize High Resolution CC.
Regarding SWAM, I have not been able to make the Flute produce any sound at all with a CC11 of below something like 10, at all.
Peter Siedlaczek wrote: low velocities,
As said I have the Flutes, and up till now I am unable to understand how to define what exactly the Note-On Velocity is used to model the SWAM tone. The only obvious thing is the portamnento time (if enabled). But even this is rather "funny", as it creates effects that are nice but in very often seem impossible to do with a real flute. I am more interested in this issue than most, as with a Breath controller and a keyboard, for me Note-On Velocity is completely independent of CC11, other than with a Wind Controller (that seemingly produces related velocity and CC11 values) and with a pure keyboard setup (with CC11 being a rather slow controller).
Unfortunately my current keyboard does not send note-off velocity. But this might be viable to influence the model parameters, as well.
-Michael
I do think Peter have a point, adding breath noise to the tone of the existing SM trumpet does not sound like Chat. I do find that tweaking the expression curve to trigger softer samples provides a bit more breather sound with decent compression, so that maybe the best way to do it with current version.
Audio so that I can test the algorithm without owning a "Trumpet".
Kobir wrote: I do think Peter have a point, adding breath noise to the tone of the existing SM trumpet does not sound like Chat.
I don't doubt this at all. But as it's really easy to do I would just like to check, if the simple "Funkelrauschen" algorithm might be able to do something useful.
Kobir wrote: I do find that tweaking the expression curve to trigger softer samples provides a bit more breather sound with decent compression, so that maybe the best way to do it with current version.
That is supposedly correct. Does the EWI send High resolution CC ? As discussed earlier, my SWAM Flute does not even do a sound at all with so low CC11. (You intended to send me a setup of yours for checking if I do something wrong.)
-Michael
Yes ... a breathy sound should be a great improvement for the trumpet, mostly for the Chet style ...
Not really sure that original recording was "jazz oriented" and even with a breathy sound, the choices of the instrument, mutes, attitude, mics are important.
Cornet is a good alternate choice for Chet, but note range is shortest than the trumpet ... could it be extended ?
Regards
I had similar issues with swam sax. You can try and tweak the sax all day and night and you wouldn't get Paul Desmond sound on alto or Stan Getz sound on tenor. You can get closer on swam, because all the adjustable parameters and mic positions, but you compromise timber realism the more you tweak the instruments far from their original recordings. I think that in addition to using different microphones and EQ, softer breathy sounds require different playing technic on real trumpet and in saxes also different instrument configuration (mouthpiece and reed)...
AFAIK, the SWAM engine does not use any samples at all. The physical model supposedly has a lot of parameters hat can be influenced. I think, the Style slider is a macro-parameter that synchonously modifies a lot of model-parameters.
BTW.: moving the Style slider while playing works loerfectly for me. So it's really bad that it can't be mapped to a Midi CC.
-Michael
This is from http://www.swamengine.com/about/
"SWAM uses real instruments samples as raw material, chromatically performed by professional musicians on a wide dynamic range. The resulting timbre is therefore the same as the real instrument, but the analogy with samples-based libraries is just that.
The proprietary and patented SWAM technology, using advanced processing techniques, allows you to morph the sound and interpolate it continuously between different “vectors”, such as time, dynamics, pitch, formants, sub-harmonics, overtones, and so on, thus giving the user the opportunity to play under its control the broadest possible range of articulations never reached before, and above all in real-time."
-Michael
The original takes of the trumpet weren't full jazz oriented.
Sound is marvelous for latin jazz and very close to Paquito D'Rivera ... work also well on Spain ... Santana ...
When you start to play cool jazz or real book tunes, it's more difficult to archieve the right sound.
My (great) guitar player said it sound sometime Mariachi !!!
Idem for sax tenor ... the old KONTAKT version is far better for Stan Getz ... and slow tunes.
A softer breathy trumpet (without any mute) should be excellent for Chet / Botti and other ...
A good cornet sound could be another way.
Miles style is another thing : Miles aslo play with microphone axis (even with wireless : he move the mike all the time to get darker, closer, brighter ... and also speak with it ... "maaaan ... it's your night" ....