Holy event editor Batman! Well, that sounds like a huge huge amount of
editing is required to get results. That is an amazing effort of work
to put that script together, and I don't mean to discourage you from
it, but here are a few other ways that I've found for producing
realistic guitar strums.
There is a softsynth from Musiclabs called Real Guitar. It has many
performance modes, but one of them is intended for performing
realistic guitar strums. With one hand, you play a cord (in piano
style, first inversion), and with the other hand, you press reserved
note keys that control performance technique. For example, you hold
down an e and g with your left hand to indicate and e minor cord, and
you rock back and forth between pressing a C# and a d# with your right
hand to alternate between up and down strumming. The program is smart
enough to figure out the correct guitar fingering for whatever cord
you're playing. There are also keys in the right hand for performing
mutes, slaps, etc. Incidentally, Real Guitar has other cool modes,
such as pick mode. Pick mode works similarly to the strum mode that I
described, except the right-hand performance control keys have
different functions. There are the mute/slap keys, but you can play C
through A to play individual notes in the cord. This means that you
can hold down a few notes in a piano style cord with your left hand,
and arpeggiate up and down through the strings with your right hand,
among other approaches. The sample library contains steal and nylon
acoustic guitars, sampled at every fret, with 10 alternate samples for
each fret. So, even if you retrigger the same note over and over, it
doesn't sound like the same sample again and again. The plug in can be
edited from either the inspector or DirectiXer.
Besides dedicated softsynths, there are the Motif ES and Tyros, with
their mega voice guitars, and specialized arpeggiators that will
produce all sorts of guitar riffs, complete with mutes, bends, etc, in
whatever cord you play.
The Mo/Tyros is probably the best bet for quickly producing electric
guitar tracks. There aren't nearly as many systems for electric guitar
as their are for acoustic. There are a few electric guitar solutions
that I know of for Giga, like the LPC stuff, but that requires more
programming than playing.
One exception, though, is ReFX's Slayer. This softsynth can produce
all of the chugging electric rhythm guitar parts that you'd ever want.
They sound better than any synth that I've ever heard. The guitar is
physically modeled. It sounds great through distortion, with lots of
tone variation that you don't get from sample libraries. However, if
you take the effects off of it, it sounds a bit synthetic, so you'd
never be able to use it for funk or R&B where clean electric is common.
Bryan
-----Original Message-----
From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On
Behalf Of Greg Brayton
Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2007 8:48 AM
To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ddots-l] Re: ChordStrum.cal
Phil I'm a guitar player, and I'd love to try this, but as a computer
wise fellow, you'd have to say I'm not as with it. However, if you
could talk me through some things instilation wise, and any other
technical deal that might come along, I'd love to give this deal a
try. Thanks for trying this stuff Phil. I think it's great!
http://www.gbrayton.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Halton" <philhalt@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "ddots-l" <ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, December 31, 2006 12:51 PM
Subject: [ddots-l] ChordStrum.cal
Hello listers,
A while back I mentioned a CAL program I was working up to enable
chord strumming. Well, I've been working like a dog on this software
and have probably over 150 hours of development into it now. The
good news for me
is
that its essentially finished and I'm doing final testing and working
up
the
documentation for it(the easy part).
It features the ability to:
Set the span of chord tones (the seperation of chord tones in ticks)
Scale and reverse scale the span by percentages (increases, or
decreases
if
reverse scaling, span of latter chord tones an additional x%)
set velocity of chords with different settings available for
upstrokes and downstrokes. Also allows for scaling and reverse
scaling of chord tone velocities.
Set duration of chords, with ability to randomly adjust durations of
individual chord tones for a "looser" feel.
All settings are made at runtime, but you can also adjust program
settings "on the fly" from within the sequence itself through the use
of "chord events" which are manually embedded notes from the zero
octave that the program responds to by adjusting settings
accordingly, and then
discarding
from the sequence. These "chord event" markers can be combined in
different
ways for different effects like upstroke, reverse velocity scaling,
linear span etc.
Its fairly powerful and flexible compared with most CAL programs I've
seen.
Now that I've encoded all the features I thought useful, all that
remains
is
to put it through its paces and see how these features combine, and
just what they're capable of producing.
My goal in all this has been to produce a program that will answer
the
need
for a flexible and easy to use way to simulate realistic guitar
rhythm patterns from a MIDI controller. As much as possible, I have
kept the emphasis on intuitiveness and simplicity of use. The
biggest problem with CAL scripts is that basically, you have no real
idea what they will do as there is virtually no documentation that
accompanies them. So, I am
writing
up a full length documentation as well as a few sammple Sonar
projects showing its use.
If anyone(preferably a guitar player with plenty of Sonar experience)
would
be interested in doing a little beta testing, please contact me
off-list
at:
philhalt@xxxxxxxxxxx
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