Will Realism No Longer Matter?

[Rudi]

On the topic of double-drummers, there's more than you may think....Allman Brothers & Doobie Brothers for starters

 

 

I dont know why it is, but lots of bands I like feature two drummers.

 

This is by no means exhaustive…

 

Widespread Panic

Little Feat (original)

Rusted Root

Charlie Daniels Band

Los Lobos (intermittently)

Grateful Dead

Marshall Tucker Band

Mother of Invention (Intermittently)

Steely Dan (briefly)

[Danidog]

Some great bands ya got listed there.

[Danidog]

So....I guess the moral of the story is.....if you've got a Taylor, stay the hell out of the Appalachians  Pretty sure I can do that 

 

Sound like a bunch of folks I'd have absolutely no interest in knowing....EVER.

I do see the value in having personal standards, but there are reasonable limits to everything. I doubt these folks could spell reasonable. LOL

Good story though & good to know things have eased up a bit.

 

Tom

Oh, don't sell them short, they can spell it, just don't know what it means.

[TapperMike]

I think if we all take a look back at ourselves we can find lines in the sand we won't cross over either. If I'm going to watch a martial arts movie it better have an asian person as the lead character.

[starise]

Great topic! Lots of great points apready made.

 

This subject has been close to me for a few weeks as I have been getting more into orchestral and cinematic music and this seems to be the main kinds of music where realism is sometimes listened to more ciritcally ....although I have heard heated discussions among rock drummers on where the cymbals should be panned. 

 

There are string libraries you can buy where these decisions have already been made if you play the parts like a string player would i.e. not chords ... The articulations and pannings are already worked out. Personally I like to hear a realistic orchestral experience. At the very least I like to hear realistic samples and non mechanical sound more humanlike playing. I can usually tell when A. Someone used a bad set of samples and B. When they leaned too heavily on midi....I'm not as concerned about panning.

 

One issue is writing string parts for real string players who can't be fooled and who need to have a really good approximation if they're going to play along with it...and this is one common trick to fool you into thinking you hear a whole string orchestra. Hire one or two real players to play along with the sound libraries. That way you get some of those articulations out front and it makes you think it sounds like a whole section.One composer I talked with uses some of his own home made samples. The articulations are the main thing that gives it more realism and there are many of these articulations happening together, plucks, legato, fortissimo. Most sample libraries can't hope to duplicate all of those like a real player would.

 

Does anyone care? I think a good ear might perk up and realize something wasn't  quite right. Even an untrained ear...so there is that expectation with that kind of music. Many of the people who listen to it are players and they would toss a track that sounded like fake strings right into the trash.

 

Midi guitar is another one that I haven't ever gotten quite right. No matter what you do, the basic sampled guitar poo on keyboards is nothing like the real thing. When I hear that stuff I always stop it as soon as I hear it....picky I guess It sounds like an 8 bit Nintendo game to me. But that's me and YMMV:)

[TapperMike]

Well If it's any consolation I don't play sampled guitars on keyboards or my ztar.  I will say I'm rather impressed with KeyTar Jeff on RealGuitar.  Yes I could tell the difference blindfolded but I still applaud the effort

 

[Space]

haha that guys is awesome!!  I could see and watch him do that for awhile I think. Entertaining. 

[Paul Battersby]

 ....although I have heard heated discussions among rock drummers on where the cymbals should be panned. 

 

Audience perspective vs drummer perspective. Yes. I've wondered about that myself. It seems to be down to personal preference although I keep trying to remember to listen closely to radio songs to see how the drums are panned.

 

 

 Midi guitar is another one that I haven't ever gotten quite right.

 

Besides a good midi guitar sound, maybe you already know this, but it's also important to know what notes would actually be played by a guitarist strumming a chord (unless the guitar plugin takes care of that). For example, on a keyboard, to play an E, I might think to play the following 6 notes (since a guitar has 6 strings)

 

E G# B E G# B

 

but a guitarist would not, and probably could not, do that. It would be (if playing an open chord):

 

E B E G# B E

Edited January 29, 2015 by pbattersby

[Rudi]

Personally I like to hear a realistic orchestral experience. At the very least I like to hear realistic samples and non mechanical sound more humanlike playing.

*

Most sample libraries can't hope to duplicate all of those like a real player would.

 *

Does anyone care? I think a good ear might perk up and realize something wasn't  quite right. Even an untrained ear...so there is that expectation with that kind of music. Many of the people who listen to it are players and they would toss a track that sounded like fake strings right into the trash.

 

 

I too have aspirations to produce authentic classical sounding original pieces. I don’t do it because I cant figure out the best approach. Or at least the best affordable approach. Coupled with the fact that much of the keyboard tech utterly bewilders me.

[TapperMike]

Paul, there is much more to reproducing technique then chord formations.

 

Everything affects everything else. Lets take a simple pull off. To achieve a proper pull off for the string to ring out one has to drag the string before releasing it.  This drag on the string causes varying degrees of pitch shift before the finger is released.  A lot of new students often over drag to get the note to vibrate.  New or old subtle or dramatic that pitch shift is still there to varying degrees. While someone like Keytar Jeff may indeed wiggle the bend and have some special setting for recreating a proper legato response for pull offs the legato performance of handling a pull off is unlike a 'mono " mode on a keybed. It's still considered legato however the pull off itself is much like a fresh attack ass opposed to a slide or bend or as previously mentioned "monophonic' keyboard setting. The pre bending before pull off only affects the string being pulled off. If you have a passage where by only one string gets a pull off but it is supported by other strings such as using a pull off or a hammer on in conjunction with a chord.  The physics of performing on a keybed simply won't allow for proper articulation.

 

 

...and that's only pull offs

 

Oblique bends are when two or more strings are played at the same time however one or more strings is not bent. Or when two strings are bent to varying degrees at the same time.  It's part and parcel of country playing but has also been adapted by other types of music as well. While full polyphonic aftertouch keybeds have come a long way even those really don't do pedal steel licks justice. For that type of oblique bending one would need to invest in a linnstrument.

 

 

The location of the strumming hand has a direct result in controlling resonance. If strums/picks close to the bridge the tone can sound brittle chimey. If one strume further up the neck a different character in tonality comes out. this has to do with string resistance.  Older jazz rhythm players would play beats 1 and 3 closer to the neck and beats 2 and four closer to the bridge but...all downstrokes. Downstrokes sound different then upstrokes and it's not just the cascade order of the notes.

 

This guy is one of the few that get the proper Freddie Green strum method correct

 

Programming key switching to properly reproduce pick location (not direction) in a continuous fashion hasn't been seen yet in a guitar vi. And I'm not to sure about pick direction either.  Most of the larger name guitar vi brands will have some type of in-authentic round robin approach with key triggers to get a more desirable response.

 

I really liked Emu (dsf)'s approach to bow direction via key switching

 

The thing is.. Emulator X won't run on more current versions of Windows as it did on win98/vista.  DSF has tried to port the libraries to different formats but the scripting is not the same and the ProtX or EmX

 

 

GuitarMidi (as in pitch to midi) is hopeless imho. I don't care if you are using fishman triple play or roland gk/gr/gi technology. It's just sad. I've played near every guitar to midi system known to man aside from maybe synthaxe and the divide between credible and attainable is simply too wide.  That being said I have nothing but joy playing my ztars which are not guitars by any stroke of the imagination.  I think if I were to pursue a different midi controller at this state of the game it would be the linnstrument.  I know it would be a learning curve and it would take time to fully acclamate myself to the instrument.

[Paul Battersby]

Paul, there is much more to reproducing technique then chord formations.

 

Of course. I just mentioned one thing that is easy to over look.

[starise]

TapperMike- I only had one question about some terminology in the above post. Can you explain the meaning of this?

 

" fresh attack ass "

 

It sounds like an interesting term........ok I'm playing wit ya! ......I've been having trouble with my keyboard too. It sometimess double types and does other weird stuff that I swera wasn't me....ahh see there! I know I typed "swear" but it came out as swera...and I think that might be clothing for a sheep dog and I didn't mean that.

 

Rudi- I'd still give it a shot! Why not? There's nothing to loose. What's brown and lays on the piano bench??? Answer- Bethoven's 5th movement. I know you wouldn't come up with anything as bad as that I say give it a shot!!!!!!!

 

I think it would be cool to have a few examples of real .vs fake midi guitar to see if we can tell the difference....almost everything is sample libraries now, and I don't know how many musicians are learning the cello...so we are left with trying to replicate it as close as possible. FWIW good samples are real people playing real instruments and that can sound "real" enough to even fool a conductor. As to how many people are really into making it sound real...I doubt many are.

The key switching and articulation keys in Kontakt ( the pink keys) let a person really taylor an instruments articulations. The mod wheel takes it a step further by allowing real time vibrato and volume swells.

 

"GuitarMidi (as in pitch to midi) is hopeless imho. I don't care if you are using fishman triple play or roland gk/gr/gi technology. It's just sad. I've played near every guitar to midi system known to man aside from maybe synthaxe and the divide between credible and attainable is simply too wide.  That being said I have nothing but joy playing my ztars which are not guitars by any stroke of the imagination.  I think if I were to pursue a different midi controller at this state of the game it would be the linnstrument.  I know it would be a learning curve and it would take time to fully acclamate myself to the instrument."

 

I agree...I posted here and I must not have sent it? I don't know but a post is missing...no worries. In that post I mentioned that I'm not faimilar with the ztar. It's all interesting TapperMike....I was under the impression that they were close to getting it right. I use an emulation guitar- the JTV 69 Variax...no midi. It reproduces models of Les Pauls, Fenders and many others. It even has a 12 string acoustic in it. 

[TapperMike]

I had to re-read my posts about a dozen times to find where I stated "fresh attack ass"  I still can't find it.  In the video regarding the emu library It's explained as bringing a variation of timbre to each time the note is articulated.  Various libraries have "round robin" where a different yet similar sound is played with each new note.

 

Re ztar,,, see my avatar. It's a baby-Z (ztar) I also have a z6

 

They are produced by Starr Labs

Here's a mini-Z

 

Here's the most advanced model known as the clipper.

 

Les Fradkin does all his parts off of a z7

 

I stopped playing guitar for my first 6 months of owning a ztar. There was just too much to explore.  Everyday I'd want to pick up the ztar and play the heck out of it. 

[starise]

Really cool Tapper!ike.....now I want one:)

For pure metal guitar rage I want this library .....a far shot from sampled romplers. The price is steep but watch the video and you'll see why.

[TapperMike]

That's an ear opener.

[Rudi]

Re ztar,,, see my avatar. It's a baby-Z

 

I always wondered what is was. I imagined it to be an electrical component of a much smaller scale.

[Danidog]

I thought it was an accordion   Maybe a foreign brand .

[TapperMike]

Funny you mention accordion.

 

There are several approaches to playing ztars.  On accordions one plays chord and bass via the buttons and melody via the keys. The accordion approach to ztar is playing chords and or bass with one hand while the other hand plays the melody.  It's all tapped.Jeff Moen is the master of this approach....

 

 

 

I've dabbled a bit with the concept myself.

[Danidog]

Man, that is some serious left brain/right brain stuff going on at one time.

[Bridget Murphy]

On 2/3/2015 at 1:49 AM, TapperMike said:

Funny you mention accordion.

 

There are several approaches to playing ztars.  On accordions one plays chord and bass via the buttons and melody via the keys. The accordion approach to ztar is playing chords and or bass with one hand while the other hand plays the melody.  It's all tapped.Jeff Moen is the master of this approach....

 

 

 

 

I've dabbled a bit with the concept myself.

 

The accordion approach to playing the Ztar sounds like a unique and skillful way to adapt traditional accordion playing to a digital instrument.