First thanks Jason for making the video tutorials demonstrating how to program sampler instruments. They are definitely the guideline that walks me through the whole process.
- Watching Video Tutorials
The first step, obviously, was watching both of the videos so that I could have some sense about what we’d be doing later. We did not have Sound Forge at that time, so everything was on Audition. I just skimmed through the Sound Forge part and focused on the Audition part. I always feel Audition is the most user friendly software product we have been trying out, so I had watched a bunch of Audition video tutorials beforehand, including some on noise capture and reduction, which I applied later with sample editing since we never had an environment that was quiet enough for recording.
- Recording Samples: First Try
Since Erica plays cello, we automatically chose cello as our sampler. She brought her cello in one afternoon and we recorded some long notes at the end of the day, mostly 3 notes each octave. We tried a couple of times to get the best result. We thought they would be fine to make samples and called it a day.
- Selecting Loop Points: First Try
There remained the problem of making loop points. The next day we realized that the waveform of cello was so uneven that it was really hard to find proper loop points in long notes, especially when we compared it with that of the saxophone that the other group was editing.
Jason came in on that Friday and explained how to make perfect loops by splitting the sample into two parts, switching their positions and mixing down them. I practiced on that on the coming Monday but didn’t get satisfactory result since Audition automatically adjusts the splitting points and thus the loop is never perfect =( So I pretty much gave up on it after a couple days of trying.
- Loading Samples into Reason
Our loops weren’t very good, but still workable. I just went ahead loading the samples in Reason. Here came the problems with bit-depth and sample size. Jordan helped me out on that part. The converting of bit-depth should absolutely be included in the video tutorial since EVERYONE, no exaggeration, has encountered that problem. Even later when we rerecord the notes in 16-bit, we still need to go through the converting after editing the loop points for some reason. Also, some files are too big to load in Reason. So we decided to START OVER!
- Recording Samples: Second Try
To have a better idea on which notes to pick and what the original samples sound like, I opened up Reason and loaded one cello sampler in NN-XT. I went through each of the notes and got to know where the loop points usually are picked. The notes actually are shorter than I thought. I used the cello sampler as a template and planned to take the notes used in it. I realize the notes are actually not evenly taken: fewer samples are taken in higher octaves as those notes are less used in cello performance. Then Erica brought her cello in again on Monday and we recorded some short notes.
- Selecting Loop Points: Second Try
Then on that Tuesday, we finally got Sound Forge in the lab. Jordan was editing their saxophone samples on that computer for the first two days and told me about some problems he encountered. Then on Wednesday Erica and I stayed after work and I started trying out Sound Forge. It is definitely much easier to identify appropriate loop points on Sound Forge than Audition, since you can have a view of both ends of the loop at the same time (=
- Loading Samples into Reason and Playing for the First Time
After edited all the samples with Sound Forge, I loaded them into Reason and had our own first sampler.
I looked up the sheet music of Unfaithful by Rihanna and typed in all (almost) the notes into reason, and played it. It took me a good amount of time but I enjoyed it. It’s already something that I could never do before. The piece sounded alright to me except a couple of notes were quite off tune.
- Tuning
Erica listened to it and she found the notes need to be tuned as well….no need to say.. her ears are much more sensitive than mine. We finished tuning in like 5 minutes, and she played another piece with it. I think our sampler is now finished =)
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