I think it’s fair to say that virtual instruments and modern DAWs have opened up the world of composing for video games, media, and song writing in a way previously unprecedented. The fact is that as composers, we are all likely to make use of virtual and sampled instruments in some way throughout our careers. Many composers (ourselves included) own large collections of many instruments, giving us a wide palette of sounds to choose from.
It is the hope that through careful choice of different instruments, and our own composition style, we can craft something unique to each project. However it is also the case that we can often hear very similar sounding tracks across different composers of a certain level; are there any sounds that you notice in a lot of tracks? There is of course nothing wrong with this – we ourselves often use many of the popular sample libraries from Spitfire Audio, Eastwest, 8Dio, Native Instruments etc. simply because they can sound great, and sometimes we are up against tight deadlines and don’t have the time (or budget) to go out and gather the best musicians around to make a great live recording.
Sample libraries are amazing, but have you ever thought about making your own?
It would be unfeasible to try and make something even close to the deep sampled, multi microphone, multi mixed, super realistic libraries you get nowadays. You can though, make an instrument of your own that is still very playable, and totally unique. Best of all it’s possible to make your own instrument in a day if you know what you’re doing.
Stimulus – Pianobook Pianoday 2020
Christian Henson set up Pianobook in 2019. It is a community of composers/musicians that is sampling their own instruments and sharing them online for free. It has been very inspiring to watch and hear the instruments that people have come up with in the short time since it started.
Christian put out a call for composers to collaborate on a huge systems piece for piano day 2020 - 28th March. He wrote a piece of music containing a ‘pulse’ and some chords on piano in the key of D Dorian, inviting people to write their own tracks to add to his piece in the hope of creating a massive collaborative piece of music.
It is a daunting task to try and fit in potentially hundreds of different musical tracks into one piece of music, but hopefully we can produce something that is fit to be included in this piece.
This presents us with one of those lovely win-win-win scenarios. We can create a sample library of our own, submit it to pianobook for people to freely use, and write some music with it to take part in the pianobook pianoday composition. We’ll have to learn some Kontakt scripting, have to write some demo music, produce a video walkthrough, and get to share our work with the community.
The Sample library – Enter my old Bechstein Model 10 Piano
I’m lucky to have my own upright piano, purchased a few years ago. I’ve sampled it before and it’s been used in my productions already.
We need a piano sound that doesn’t take up too much ‘sonic space’ in a track, so that it might find a place in Christian’s piece. Being fans of E.S.T as one example, Esbjorn Svensson often mutes the piano strings by hand to alter the sound, and for certain rhythmical passages. Check the repeated figure on this track to see what we mean around 0:20…
E.S.T – Sipping on the solid ground
This muted sound might be handy for this kind of systems music, but because of the likelihood of plenty of repeated notes, we need to record a little deeper than 1 sample per note. We recorded the piano in 4ths, with three different velocities, and 3 repeats (round robins) of each velocity.
To see some background on the recording, take a look at our video below:
With a bit of tweaking, the instrument came out pretty good. We managed to add some rudimentary controls to get quick changes to the sound – Big thanks to David Hilowitz for making a load of great YouTube tutorials on sampling in Kontakt, he was a big inspiration! (David’s Tutorial playlist is here)
You will be able to download the sample library to use in your own productions very soon, for free. It has been submitted to the pianobook website, so once it’s up there we’ll put the link on the YouTube vids and wherever we can. Please let us know if you download the library (download from here) and especially if you get any use out of it, if there is enough interest we will look at releasing some more of our own libraries for free in the future..
In the meantime, you can watch me demo the library below, and hear some contextual demos that use the new sounds.
Also you can hear myself and Chris’ entries for the pianobook piano day piece below. They’re in isolation, so not particularly interesting, but hopefully some of it ends up in the final piece.
Special thanks go to Christian Henson for his YT channel work, which was a big inspiration to us making these libraries, and to the many other great tutorials and references out there on Kontakt development from Mario Krušelj/EvilDragon, Jon Meyer, David Healy, and again David Hilowitz.
Have you had any success in making your own instruments? Or is there any kind of instrument you’d like to hear us try and sample? If so, let us know in the comments.
Take care,
Dan