Re: Improvisation on pitches from a recording of a song

Hi Danny,

Yes I agree, I'm pretty satisfied with this as
a midi violin :-).

It's the violin from Dan Dean's solo strings CD
- a gig file. I used to use gigasampler le to play
it on my old p.c. But it was rather limited in polyphony on my old 400 Mhz machine, only about
two note polyphony though it would be better with a better soundcard.

Gigasampler won't run in XP though so for
now I'm using VSampler on my new laptop.
It's 2.4 GHz, and even with a very lack-lustre standard
sound card on the laptop it has plenty of processing
power for quite a bit of polyphony. I plan to get
an external soundcard. One of the ones I'm looking at
is the Tascam 122. That actually comes with GigaStudio LE
bundled with the soundcard (though one reviewer found
it only works with the soundcard, so perhaps the giga le uses the
soundcard as a dongle) and it has had good reviews,
and it also supports 24 bit recording.
(FTS 3.0 supports reading and saving 24 bit and 32 bit audio files and I can probably
get it to record them and play them back too if
with a suitable soundcard to test it on - well
24 bit anyway, maybe 32 bit is a bit specialised
still).

Yes they record each note for a really long sample,
and because each one is subtly different, in the
way it sounds and the slight differences of performance,
that really helps it to sound like the real thing
and the vibrato is real and not mechanical like the
kind of vibrato you get on a short looped wave sample.

I played it from a midi keyboard plugged into my laptop.
Just got myself the 88 key M-audio keystation with half
weighted keys which has better velocity control than
the keyboards I used before for my improvisations.

So it just needed the Dan Dean solo strings CD, VSampler, FTS which I used to retune to the scale,
and the keyboard and my laptop of course.

BTW FTS 3.0 is now getting good enough at recognising
recorder tunes, so that I can play a tune and record
it and then it can play it back on any other voice,
e.g. this violin sound :-). It even gets the little
grace notes in the scottish dance tunes I play.
But it really brings out any flaws in my intonation
to hear it played back on a violin and such a nice sounding one too :-).

The recorder is particularly easy for it. Also flute
and such like instruments. It's also not doing too
badly at other things - managed recordings of
quite a variety of instruments from web pages the
other day including some Vietnamese percussion ones
I tried it on, though only for slower notes not as fast as the ones it can manage on the recorder.
Ocarina is particularly easy for it.

Robert