Feature requests and suggestions for the Sensory Percussion team
Hello, first off i hope this is the right place for this post. I love this technology that you guys have advanced, it is really interesting and the implementations are endless. I have been delving into the software and I have come across a situation that is taking me a lot of energy to wrap my mind around. I am faced with the task of using another software, Samplit, and yours to hopefully create a large yet intricately deep sample library that when played with SP allows us to play a natural, yet secretly electronic instrument.
We started off by asking the question “how many prerecorded samples does it take to fool the human mind into thinking that it is not hearing samples?”. I have been doing some research in the area of psychology and through trial and error, we have found that many samples need to be recorded at different velocity levels to sound as if the acoustic instrument is being played physically rather than in a sampler.
So, my question for you is: How can I make different samplers, which are separated by the different velocity of the original recordings, trigger independently based on the velocity of the drummer who is playing in SP.
For our first trials we have been using a Glockenspiel. We started by recording may samples of one note in a program called Samplit. Samplit is designed to allow you to record a desired range of an instrument (Audio, Midi or VST) at multiple velocity layers. We want to take these and load them into SP and match the velocity of the drummer to the velocity of the recordings so that when a pad is hit, the corresponding sampler sounds. I hope that is clear enough for you, I am still trying to wrap my mind around it all so clarity may be skewed.
I have not been able to find anything on this topic in the manual or the tutorial videos, and I am starting to lean towards the conclusion it is not yet possible. If I am wrong, I’d really appreciate a tutorial for accomplishing the task. If I am right, my feature request would be to add a velocity range to each sampler within a pad that allows you to dictate at which velocity the sampler triggers. This, in my opinion, would grant SP more merit to owning the term “revolutionary”.
Thank you,
Austen
Hi Austen,
So glad you are diving into SP and pushing the limits. I’d suggest you take a look at the Live Kit preset. That kit uses velocity controllers on the sampler selectors to do what you are saying. I think it has about 70 samples on just the snare.
Let me know if that’s what you’re looking for.
Tenoch
I will when I get back to the studio.
How do you set that specific controller up to function correctly? I thought a velocity controller on the cycler would be the answer but I didn’t quite understand how to set the parameter. Can you set it up so a specific velocity range triggers samples from a specific sampler?
Wr were thinking we are going to have 10 samples for each velocity layer so separate samplers seemed the way to go for workflow purposes and so we can individual set the parameters for each velocity range.
Does that make sense?
I share your passion and thoughts about utilizing Sunhouse Sensors for this application to “Revolutionize” drum performance and drum programming and have some ideas I thought I would share.
I just completed some video demonstrations and promotional videos for another music technology company in the UK called Touchkeys ( www.touchkeys.co.uk ) that I try to show how you can use
multi-touch gestures similar to SP but on a midi keyboard that utilizes X/Y position,AfterTouch,Multi-Finger gestures to trigger sampled and physical modeling articulations in real-time performance.
You can check out the video here if it interests you:
I think a lot of sample manufactures are doing hybrid methods of sampling and physical modeling to do this efficiently but I have been waiting for a company to come up with hardware that can accurately model the surface and technique of drums beyond just position and velocity and Sunhouse has done this. High CPU processing for super low latency and Large SSDs are needed but aside from this discussion there are a couple of things that come up when using only samples to achieve the accurate “Model”.
The first is handling overlap of round robins of phase particularly on long decaying cymbals and Hi-Hats which 8DIO has some algorithms handling some of this in their Blackbird drumkit.
The other and more interesting idea that Id love to see Sunhouse do is to create an automated sampling program that works in conjunction with the sensors to be used during the sampling process in the studio on the drums that you are sampling.
The idea being that at some point…accurately mapping and hitting a drum with varying amounts of the stick in different areas and velocities as well as collecting multiple round robins for each articulation can get tedious to edit and map. Not to mention you can lose the “Feel” of how you are hitting the drum when you’re trying to keep up with that many zones.
By creating this automated sampling software you can have the SP sensors tell the software where to map the incoming sample during the sampling process of the acoustic kit and it can keep up with the sorting. The software can create meta-tag data attached to the sample of where on the drum it was hit and at what velocity, how much stick was in contact, which articulation, velocities that are close can be marked as round robins…etc. Then after any processing and editing is done…you can reimport and have the software resort based on the original meta-tagging.
If this process is automated then you can capture even more levels of detail by sampling performance phrases in context for smooth transitions of velocities and blends.
For Example…sampling a buzz roll and these slices are velocity step-thru triggered only when you play at a certain speed. Again 8DIO has used a blend of out of context sampling and speed sampling and it gives more realism. Again this amount of sampling would be tedious without an automated sampler but because you can have the SP sensors on the drums with real drumheads during the sampling session you can use that to your benefit.
I just ordered my 4 sensors for the studio and will experiment on this myself.
I’d love to hear any feedback from Sunhouse might have on this idea.
Thanks again for the great tech!!
Best,
Mike Bailey