Updated: See http://createdigitalmusic.com/snowleopard for a running report.

Apple’s “Snow Leopard” 10.6 ships Friday, which means it’s time to start compiling information about the new OS flavor. Just don’t upgrade too fast, as always.

Want to push an operating system to the breaking point? Ask a musician. Between the demands of real-time performance and the complex ecosystem of mix-and-match hardware, software, and plug-ins, odds are your local audio geek will break an OS faster than anyone else. Not every operating system upgrade is going to have a big impact on music software, but keep in mind that even subtle changes can cause issues that may interfere with your work.

Of course, all of this means music users should treat any OS update with caution. :

• If you’ve got a critical, primary production machine, your best bet is often simply to wait. Confirm that software works before you upgrade rather than after.
• If you’ve got some time to invest in an upgrade or have more than one machine, be sure to do a full backup and system image so you can revert to the previous, known working OS.
• Best solution: Boot off an external hard drive. Don’t commit to installing internally until you’re sure everything is working. Once you are, go enjoy. (as noted in comments, and yes, I should have said this initially… still, the latest 10.5 build is still the preferred OS for now.)

So, sit back. Enjoy life. Go for a walk on a beach. Recline in your favorite chair with your MacBook running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Isn’t it great? Need to waste time? Plants vs. Zombies is out for Mac.

What? Still want to upgrade?

Fair enough. We’ll be tracking changes to Snow Leopard and which of them may impact audio.

The short version: Snow Leopard introduces only small changes, but if a developer hasn’t been on top of those changes, you could see issues. And as for the 64-bit mode that’s attracting most of the attention, the short answer is, you can’t use it for music yet.

Native Instruments and Plogue have each responded to CDM with information on their software.

Executive Summary

• NI and Plogue have tested their software as functioning on 10.6
• Neither NI nor Plogue recommends you upgrade your OS yet – Plogue uses stronger language to discourage you
• 64-bit support, expanded in Mac OS 10.6, is not yet relevant to music use because nothing (not even from Apple) supports it yet, but don’t worry – you can get more RAM through other methods
• Audio MIDI Setup gets a tune-up, and built-in audio support appears to be improved

Native Instruments

If you’re a Mac user who uses NI products on any version of the operating system, you should stay tuned to this URL:

http://www.native-instruments.com/en/support/compatibility/mac-os-x-compatibility/

NI tells CDM they’ve just updated it today with Snow Leopard information:

Native Instruments has conducted initial compatibility tests with Mac OS X 10.6, which have shown all current NI products to work without any specific issues under standard installations of this operating system.

However, users involved in professional audio production or live performance should be cautious about upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6 until compatibility with third-party audio software and hardware has been widely confirmed by the relevant manufacturers.

Native Instruments is currently conducting further systematic compatibility and performance tests with Snow Leopard, and will provide additional information on this page as it becomes available.

The second paragraph sounds like what I just wrote, huh?

Plogue

Plogue, an independent developer of a variety of software ranging from the awesome modular environment Bidule to sampling engines for Garritan’s orchestra and piano products and an upcoming library of vintage chip sounds have been doing their own work. Privately, I talked with them about some of the work they had to do after Apple rewrote underlying operating system plumbing with Objective-C (from C and Carbon). Here’s their official statement to CDM on Snow Leopard and, in the parallel Windows dimension, Windows 7:

10.6 and W7 each caused only minor modifications to our code base, however these mods are necessary for proper functioning of our products on those platforms. Most of our transition efforts as a company will be of a user support nature.

Any musician foolish enough to jump on new OSes without a hint of caution, inevitably makes me wish for a new kind of Darwin Award prize.

(Emphasis mine. Consider yourself warned.)

Ableton (Unofficial) and a Plug-in Warning

From the Ableton forums, via comments:

It’s currently being tested internally over here, so the current version is not officially compatible yet – on the other hand this does not mean that it doesn’t run.

We will release an update after the tests during the next weeks that will be officially compatible, but we don’t recommend upgrading yet if stability is your main concern.

It’s likely that a few new third party plugin problems will show up due to the changes under the hood in 10.6 and experiences show that the latest 10.5 versions now are the way to go after the gfx performance problems with earlier 10.5 and 10.4 versions.

So, in other words, now is a great time to upgrade to 10.5!

More in the thread here:

Ableton Forums

Now, note, mostly what this extensive discussion reveals is that Snow Leopard is poorly understood, partly thanks to a very successful hype campaign on Apple’s part. (Ahem.)

There are not magical performance and speed improvements found by installing Snow Leopard – or, most likely, any OS. (Would that such things were true.) The presence of a set of multithreading tools, for instance, is specific only to developers for whom that set of tools is useful. Audio software already has finely-tuned multithreading implementations specific to real-time applications, and in the case of something like Ableton Live, it really needs to work across platforms.

If you install a new OS with the expectation that it’ll be “faster,” you’ll almost certainly be disappointed. If you install a new OS hoping you’ll “break things,” then you probably won’t be disappointed. I don’t mean to suggest don’t ever upgrade or live in fear of all software, just that you should imagine that, like redoing the plumbing in your basement, long-term advantages will come, but with significant effort and time.

PreSonus Hardware

See a separate post: at Snow Leopard launch, PreSonus audio interfaces are likely to be entirely incompatible.

About 64-bit (Nothing to see here…)

NI notes that the 10.6 offers significant changes to 64-bit support, including a new 64-bit kernel mode – this being the rough equivalent of the “x64” 64-bit versions of Windows (and Linux) that have been available for some time.

Here’s the bottom line: 64-bit support on Mac OS isn’t yet relevant to audio users, period. It’s not supported by Apple’s own Logic Studio, or any other major host at this time. This is a situation we’ll be watching, as it is something developers appear to be investigating.

But before we get too far into that issue, you should consider why you’re asking about 64-bit in the first place. 64-bit computing offers two potential advantage. First, running processor computation natively at 64 bits offers a marginal improvement. Second – the issue most people care about for music – 64-bit memory addressing offers access to massive amounts of memory, beyond the approximate 4 GB barrier that applies to 32-bit applications.

More memory is a very good thing. But you probably don’t want to sacrifice compatibility just to get it. Fortunately, you don’t need the 64-bit OS to get beyond that 4 GB barrier. On the Mac, some workarounds have extended the practical life of 32-bit memory addressing for music applications – thus avoiding the need to get a 64-bit native version of every driver and every piece of software you want to use.

On Windows and Linux, you can indeed get a number of audio applications (like SONAR on Windows, for instance) that have excellent 64-bit support, and a number of the drivers have followed suit. Even, then, though, many users choose to stick with 32-bit versions in order to have superior compatibility.

Note that processing “64-bit audio” – that is, digital audio represented using 64-bit data – is a completely different issues. A 32-bit processor and 32-bit operating system and 32-bit software can all do 64-bit audio processing. Whether you really need 64 bits for audio production is a whole other can of worms I won’t open here.

Getting More Memory – Without Any 64-bit Snow Leopards

When I spoke to Apple earlier this month, they downplayed the 64-bit issue and pointed out that their own EXS24 sampler in Logic Studio can access additional installed memory just fine with 32-bit – that means if you have Logic 8 or later, Pro or Express, Tiger or Leopard or Snow Leopard, you can use additional RAM. Each EXS24 sampler instance has its own memory space, so you can use as much memory as you want.

Apple even has a support doc on the subject:

Logic Pro/Express 8: How the EXS24 sampler addresses RAM in Logic 8

Last month, we looked at the situation for Native Instruments’ Kontakt. Again, using some of the flexibility of the memory architecture unique to the Mac, they’ve managed to access bigger amounts of RAM even on 32-bit OS.

Kontakt, Battery: Enhanced, More Compatible, 64-bit Memory

Kontakt is able to get up to a whopping 32 GB thanks to something called the Kontakt Memory Server. Again, you can get still more than 32 GB using 64-bit Windows, but for most users, that’s overkill.

All of this is to say, 64-bit is not a reason to upgrade to Snow Leopard for audio work – at least, not yet. Some of the built-in applications (like the Finder and Safari) get performance boosts from 64-bit optimization on 10.6, but none of that is critical to audio and music – and it’s certainly not worth upgrading too soon only to find some compatibility wrinkle we haven’t yet found.

Updates to Audio MIDI Setup

A reader tips us off to some small changes to Apple’s centralized Core Audio settings panel, Audio MIDI Setup. Audio and MIDI are now separated into separate windows, and Audio gets some nice improvements.

Note the per-app settings and adjustments for sample rate, bit depth, and Format. As in previous recent versions of Mac OS, you can also aggregate multiple physical audio interfaces into one – one of a number of reasons we really love Core Audio as a sound system.

The reader also notes that the update seems to improve support for his built-in hardware:

It’s now possible to choose a higher sample rate and resolution for all inputs/outputs on the built-in sound card of my MacBook Pro early ‘08, which is pretty cool. Before there was clearly hearable, annoying digital fragments when playing back any sounds, especially on low volume – all magically gone, i don’t hear anymore noise.

Got More Information?

Help us continue our “More Than You Wanted to Know,” obsessive series of coverage on CDM and tip us off!

Corrections and clarifications are welcome, too – that’s why I enjoy the maleable nature of the Web.

Native Instruments has updated its sampling engine, releasing beta versions 3.0.5 for its Battery drum sampler and 3.5.0 final for the flagship Kontakt sampler. Both are free upgrades. (For anyone who thought that somehow Maschine was replacing Battery, it isn’t: the former is a drum machine, whereas the latter is more like a high-end drum sampler.)

There are a number of significant enhancements, but perhaps the most interesting is the support for 64-bit memory addressing. On 64-bit Windows Vista (and upcoming 64-bit Windows 7), that gives you true 64-bit memory addressing for — well, more memory than you have. (The theoretical limit of Windows’ 64-bit architecture on Intel is 16 terabytes.) This allows native 64-bit memory addressing on Windows for both Battery and Kontakt.

The Mac isn’t quite capable of that just yet (at least no audio applications beyond Apple’s own developer tools support 64-bit memory addressing yet), but the Kontakt Memory Server gives you up to 32 GB on 10.4 and later. Clarification: The Kontakt Memory Server is available now only for Kontakt.

The other important development for both Battery and Kontakt is that compatibility with Pro Tools 8 under Mac OS 10.5 Leopard has been restored.

Getting Kontakt on 64-bit is a very big deal, because of the widespread popularity of the sampler. At the same time, the fact that it’s not alone is a good thing — it suggests 64-bit memory for samplers may be catching on. Steinberg’s HALion, Cakewalk’s Dimension Pro, Garritan’s ARIA, and the open source Linux Sampler Project are some of the more familiar samplers that have gone 64-bit recently. (Note that, despite its name, Linux Sampler can run 64-bit on both Linux and Windows.) Cakewalk did a lot to lead the way here on Windows by getting both its SONAR host and Dimension Pro (among other plug-ins) fully 64-bit early. Garritan is equally interesting, because their Plogue-based engine is getting licensed out to soundware makers and, architecturally, is built more as a cross-platform engine. Garritan ARIA is also targeting Linux, and Cakewalk and Garritan are also supporting the open SFZ format.

Okay, I should have put that in a table. Imagine a table in your mind. Wow, that looks beautiful.

What else is new in Kontakt

64-bit is the headline, but there are other enhancements, too, in the Kontakt engine:

• “Zero-memory” DFD means you use less memory when streaming from disk (and using less memory is usually the very reason you’re streaming from disk)!
• True multiprocessor/multi-core support for enhanced performance
• A virtual rack of all your installed libraries and third-party content, so it’s easier to find your sounds
• Direct MIDI learn (meaning everything is finally assignable), improved automapping, bypass for effects slots
• Pro Tools compatibility now works properly on Mac Leopard
• KSP aftertouch interpretation – so now you can do something with that aftertouch-transmitting keyboard of yours

Update: Note that these are Kontakt-specific features, and not relevant to Battery for reasons clarified below.

Battery vs. Kontakt

Updated: You will note that Native Instruments is updating Battery and Kontakt more or less at the same time, and they do share some core technologies that allow that to happen. They aren’t exactly the same under the hood, though, as NI explains to CDM:

The core engine technology is the same in Battery 3.0.5 and Kontakt 3.5, but Battery uses a “lighter” version because of its typical use case as a drum sampler.

It doesn’t include the Memory Server and the multiprocessor/multicore support because these features really only become necessary with multitimbral operation, high polyphony and a huge number of instrument samples (and heavy effects usage) like in Kontakt.

Let us know what you think if you’re a Kontakt/Battery user.

New features in Kontakt 3.5 versus 3.0 [Native Instruments]
Public beta of Battery 3.0.5 [at the NI public beta site]

Normally, pricing announcements and sales press releases bore me to tears, but this is actually news – Native Instruments is selling Komplete for July only at just US$/EUR 399, instead of $1139/EUR999.

That means if you were looking for Reaktor alone – about as good a desert island music software choice as you can find – this would be a good deal. You also get Absynth, the absurdly deep (if sometimes baffling) synth with surround sound envelopes and a workflow that could change how you think about sound, the very nice effects and loop recording in Guitar Rig, and the scriptable sampler Kontakt, as well as the Battery drum sampler and lovely Massive synth.

As recession specials go, this is a tough one to beat.

http://www.native-instruments.com/komplete5.info

In other news, we’re opening up more discussion of tools like Reaktor (among many others) to the community here on noisepages; check out Peter Dines’ recent modulations blog for thoughts on Reaktor (and the free and open source SuperCollider), or his just-formed Reaktor group, on which he asks, “what problems are you solving with Reaktor?”

You know the stereotype. “Synths” are expressive. “Samplers” are those things relegated to playing fake instruments.

But what makes synths fun to play as an instrument is the power they have over your sound, and the interactivity they provide. Peter Dines did a series for our Kore+CDM minisite at the end of last year that I think really illustrated how Native Instruments’ sampler Kontakt can be made a powerful performance tool – something that’s really fun to play. In doing so, he gets into the “s word” – scripting. When you hear “scripting,” I expect a lot of you run and hide, or wonder why the heck you’d want to write scripts when working on your music. The answer is, thanks to content that’s out there, you can make use of scripts for Kontakt without ever having to muck with code yourself. And if you do want to create your own scripts, a lot of the things you might like to do turn out to be quite simple.

What might a musical workflow look like with Kontakt? Peter answers that question with a beautiful, delicate-sounding music box patch. In this example, working directly in Kontakt allows him to start with a recorded sound and get into the manipulation phase very quickly. I know many folks use Ableton Live for the purpose, and Live is itself essentially a sampler turned into a host. But if you’re comfortable with that method, you may find the addition of something like Kontakt is all the more useful.

In the music box example, Peter looks at:

• Turning a recording into a sample
• Slicing and dicing with the Wave Editor
• Making use of presets in the Script Editor to get powerful features, then making quick modifications – no need to script from scratch

Slicing, Dicing, and Scripting a Music Box with Kontakt; Free Download

That’s a specific example. With Performance View, you can turn your sampled sounds into something that could work really well live – again, using scripts without scripting:

Learning Kontakt: Performance View and Scripting Power, Hidden in Presets

Finally, when you are ready for the power of scripts, Peter can get you started with that. With a couple of lines, you can retune, resequence, constrain to scale, pan, and randomize. That makes Kontakt a powerful compositional and performance tool.
Dive into Kontakt Scripting: A Gentle Introduction, plus Script Downloads

I hope we see scripting show up in more tools. (I’d lose my mind – in a good way – to see it in a future version of Maschine.) In the meantime, this gets you rolling.

And really, you don’t have to be an advanced sampler / sound designer / Kontakt user. I think you’ll find these tutorials to be exceedingly beginner-friendly. In fact, samplers have often gotten underused by us mere mortals. Sure, you probably don’t have time to do a massive, multisampled grand piano patch – and someone else has already done it for you. But to take a quick field recording and mangle it, samplers can be fantastic.

If you come up with anything based on these tutorials, we’d love to hear it.

Previously: Kontakt Creative Abuse and Scripting, Modular Reaktor Goodness, More On Kore@CDM

(Side note: yes, the Kore+CDM site has sprung back to life, on a new server. Enjoy!)

The current holy grail of sampling seems to be getting at more memory by providing 64-bit memory addressing, as I said this morning. With Tascam’s Giga out of the picture, it’s up to competing sampler products to deliver. Cakewalk’s Dimension Pro is already 64-bit support, as is their host, SONAR. Native Instruments points out that their flagship sampler Kontakt is on track to be 64-bit soon.

Kontakt 3 does support disk streaming now, but it can’t yet do 64-bit memory addressing. With 32-bit memory addressing, you’re limited to around a couple of gigs of available RAM. That should change soon for Kontakt, with a cross-platform release supporting as much RAM as your machine and OS can handle in the works.

The official announcement was made back in January; I think I missed it amidst the NAMM hoopla. It’ll be a free update for existing Kontakt 3 users. NI’s forum admin Thomas wrote then:

I want to bring you the good news that NI has started development on a Kontakt version that supports 64-bit memory addressing for Mac OS X 10.5 and Windows Vista 64.
This will be a free update for Kontakt 3, and will allow to go beyond the 32-bit memory addressing limit and utilize as much RAM as your operating system or host makes available.
This version of Kontakt 3 will also run as a VST plugin under 64-bit hosts in Windows Vista 64 (Windows XP 64 will likely not be supported; standalone and 32-bit plugin operation under Vista 64bit are already possible with Kontakt 3.0.1).
No specific info on the release date yet, but you can expect it sometime in the second half of 2008. It is a substantial development effort and requires a lot of testing and optimization.

Details of the update and a thread you can follow for further news is available on the NI forum:

Official update status – Kontakt 3

I expect, with the release of greater 64-bit support in Mac OS X Leopard, other cross-platform sampling solutions are likely to go 64-bit, too; any vendors with news, we’re happy to run it.

See also:

Cakewalk has a 64-bit Computing for Musicians site that talks more about what 64-bit means; their SONAR host would also provide access to 128GB of RAM for Kontakt 3.1 for 64-bit Windows, when it becomes available, so this is information that’s important across vendors.

Disclosure: CDM writes about Kontakt on our Kore minisite, which is sponsored by Native Instruments.

Creative Abuse of the Kontakt Sampler

Peter Dines’ tutorial on scripting and modulation in Kontakt 3 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Kontakt Tutorial Video: Creative Abuse with Modulation, Scripting

Kontakt 3 users, we’ll be curious to see what you do with that one.

User-Created, Free Modular Reaktor Powers in Kore

Also in the spirit of pushing tools past their usual capabilities, Eoin Rossney talks to Jonathan Adams Leonard, aka sleen, who has built an essential set of modular power tools for Kore, constructed in Reaktor. (He did this entirely for free as a user — nice.) What I especially enjoy about this is that Jonathan is upfront about things he felt like were missing in Kore 2 — but instead of just complaining about it, actually went and built it himself. As he tells the site:

Kore 2 was an ambitious release for any software team, so instead of complaining, I did what any enlightened engineer would do and built something. In some ways, there was no choice. NI created a semi modular matrix into which audio and midi objects can live simultaneously.

… The toolpack represents my preference to communicate where possible with solutions rather than suggestions or complaints.

I like that attitude. Eoin also walks through the toolpack tool by tool, with some tips from him and Jonathan for getting the most out of them, including some very powerful MIDI and audio capabilities. We have some other ideas for how to work with Kore live, and we’re learning from some folks who are using it out in performance, as well, so you can expect more on these issues soon.

Sound Design, Drum Machines, DSP

Also on the site: I find some percussion sound goodies from the So Percussion Ensemble by making use of the Kore Browser’s metadata options, and take a look at a pack full of retro drum machines from Crumar to Linn to Moog and Roland which could be a good use for your free sound pack. Make sure to authorize Kore this week if you have bought it, so you get the Massive synth free.

And lastly, while this is likely to convert even more of my weekends and evenings into sound programming time, I’m especially excited by Peter pointing to this set of tutorials on Core, the DSP geeks-only low-level sound programming engine deep in Reaktor:
She Blinded Me With DSP Science: Learn Core with Reaktor

That’s “Core” with a “C”, part of Reaktor, as opposed to Kore, a separate product. (Hey, I promised you this site wouldn’t just be about Kore.) Reaktor geeks, if anyone wants to join me on this brain-busting journey to the center of Reaktor, say so in comments and we can form an impromptu user group.

Stay tuned, we’ve got plenty more in the hopper for this site. Head over to kore.noisepages.com, or subscribe to the site’s RSS feed. And if you’re not seeing what you want, let us know in comments or contact us directly.

To really work with music software as an instrument, you have to focus on a set of tools and get deep into what they can do. Today, we’re launching the first of a limited series of minisites that lets us do that. It’s called Kore @CDM, devoted to NI’s Kore and Komplete lines. We’ve built a special blog which will feature regular tips on how to work with this set of tools, basic and advanced tutorials, and downloadable content, all free and open. (The contents of the site will be Creative Commons-licensed, so you’re free to share and modify what we do, with credit to the authors.)

Kore Minisite @CDM, http://kore.noisepages.com

 Subscribe in a reader [RSS]

Subscribe to Kore Minisite by Email

Why choose this product now?  I’ve felt really strongly, even having been critical of Kore’s first release, that Kore 2 has the potential to live up to its promise of creating a "meta-instrument" for working with sound and effects. Combined with the rest of the Komplete family, including Reaktor’s open-ended patching environment and the scriptable sampler Kontakt, NI has some deep tools — not perfect, not for everyone, but tools that matter to us. We want to really get into how to use them, and to develop a set of techniques and tools for others, both for sound design and live performance, in combination with hosts like Ableton Live. And this means not just doing stuff "by the book," but really seeing how far we can push these tools, sonically and in playability.

Kicking things off is Eoin Rossney, who talks about how to create feedback loops intentionally in Kore for special effects. It’s something mentioned in the manual, but there haven’t been instructions on how to accomplish it until now. Eoin takes that challenge on, and produces some really oddball sounds just by routing effects into themselves. Have a listen to the samples — just be sure to turn your speakers’ volume down first.

How to Route Feedback Loops in Kore – On Purpose [Kore @CDM]

Peter Dines, a Reaktor whiz and author of the Reaktor Tips blog, will also be writing and screencasting for us soon. Both Eoin and Peter have been CDM regulars, so it’s great to have them onboard.

Why we’re partnering with NI: So that we can provide as much content as we can for free, we’ve gotten sponsorship from Native Instruments to produce the site. But that doesn’t mean we want to make an "advertorial." NI has been generous enough to give us full control over the contents, and the goal isn’t a review, or an ad — it’s as much actual knowledge of these tools as we can provide. And, hey, it’s basically our job to demonstrate that by doing as good a job as we can and listening to your feedback. I’m happy to answer questions about why we’re doing things this way and what it means; we can talk in comments or contact the site.

Most of all, though, I hope you’ll check out the site. If you don’t own Kore or the other tools, we’ll still have sound and video samples and will include instructions for trying out projects in the demo, if you just want to kick the tires a bit. And definitely let us know what you think as we roll out more stories, because we want this to be as useful to you as possible.

Oh, yeah, and if you’re wondering about what the "noisepages.com" thing is about, you’ll be hearing more soon. Suffice to say the Kore site isn’t all we’re working on.

Bonus points to anyone else who had the "opportunity" to see the movie Deep Kore Core.

Composer turned sample developer Wilbert Roget, II has just released a new ‘indie’ sample library called Impact:Steel. We spoke with him to find out more about how and why he created the library and how creating his own sample libraries plays into his composition.

CDM: First, can you tell us a bit about your background, and how you got into composing and music?

Wilbert Roget, II:Well to keep things short, I’m basically a lifer with music and composition, studying piano early on and doing improvisations almost immediately (if not before). I decided on film and video game composition as a career sometime in high school, and went on to study composition, orchestration, and conducting at Yale University. I’ve been scoring films, games, ads, and various other projects ever since.

CDM:What got you into sample library creation – specifically for Impact: Steel?

WR:I’ve been making my own samples ever since I’d been scoring video games, back in the DLS era. I created Impact: Steel specifically because I had lots of musical ideas for my soundtracks that would’ve used metallic percussion, but no commercially-available libraries had the kind of instruments I wanted. Several years ago, I’d recorded a few metal objects I found in my room into a useful (albeit low-quality) soundfont, which ended up being the inspiration for Impact: Steel as it is now.

As a side note, it wasn’t until about halfway through production that I decided to release it commercially instead of keeping it private.

CDM:What goes into making a sample library? Did you just collect a bunch of noisemakers and record them, or did you have some kind of a plan before recording?

WR:Actually, I’d been collecting most of these “instruments” for years – I have a weird habit of just tapping on things and taking note of what kind of sound it makes. Since I already had the instruments, I had a good idea right away of what kinds of articulations I’d use. Each instrument is heavily multisampled, with up to 9 velocity layers and 3 round robin variations per each of the 73 different articulations (on different parts of the instrument, with different beaters, rolls, scrapes, tremolos, etc.). So I really needed a detailed outline on paper that detailed what exactly to play, in what order, specifying mixer settings and even microphone distances.

CDM:Can you tell us a bit about the process of recording your samples?

WR:Sure! As I mentioned before, it’s almost impossible to do any kind of a large-scale project without a printed cue sheet. Mine even had specifics on the number of variations, “safety” takes, exact playing position on the instruments, and so on. I’d say once you’ve done that, it’s a good idea to do several prototype recordings, not only to check levels but also to get a sense of how it’ll sound in your sampler of choice.

As for the actual recording phase, I recommend trying to do as much as possible in one take, and splitting the files up later. This helps maintain a consistent sound throughout the instrument, which is crucial for getting an organic, convincingly realistic patch. If you made a cue sheet, it should be very easy to figure out exactly what’s playing when you’re editing the large recording files.

And again I really think it’s a great idea to have a good sense of what kind of a sound you’ll want in the end. In my case, I knew I wasn’t gonna get a huge “recorded in a giant hangar” sound, and I also didn’t want a pristine and surgically-dry tone either. So instead I adjusted my mixer, EQ settings, and mic positions to get a nice room sound, not too dry and with some air/ambience. EQing at the recording stage (ie. right on the mixer) also gave my samples a clearer and more powerful bass, with high end presence as well.

CDM:From the point of raw samples, what comes next?

WR:After the recording phase, there’s the editing phase and then the implementation and sampling phase. In editing, you’re basically splitting it up into samples and doing whatever post-processing you’ll need. Sampling is where you plug all the samples into your sampler of choice.

In my case, I threw the samples into Kontakt 2 and played around with them a lot before going back and post-processing them; this helped to get a sense of what kinds of edits and effects I’d need. The final product sounds remarkably different as a result, and I almost never needed to use real-time effects in Kontakt to compensate.

I’ll also point out that I wrote demo tracks not only to show off the library, but also to get firsthand experience with it myself. This helped me figure out what kinds of tweaks the end users were likely to implement, and it gave me a lot of ideas for making the library more ergonomic and playable.

CDM:Do you find that creating samplebanks is easier in one particular format vs. another?

WR:I’m not sure how diplomatic I should be here, but, far and away Kontakt 2 was the best editor I’ve ever worked with. I’ve used lots of other editors in the past, starting off with soundfonts and DLS, and Gigastudio; nothing really compares to how powerful and easy it was to build patches in Kontakt 2. In fact, I think I’ve built new Kontakt instruments for every one of my recent film soundtracks, either editing an existing patch to fit a certain musical context or even inventing something completely new. It’s highly addictive!

CDM:What makes Impact: Steel different from some of the other ‘junk percussion’ libraries available?

WR:I think the fundamental difference is that I never really considered Impact: Steel as being “junk percussion”, but rather a library built around the concept of metallic percussion instruments. One effect is that I:S is made of detailed, organic and ergonomically playable instruments, instead of being a collection of single hits and sound effects. Additionally, its basis on an abstract concept also meant that I could include a diverse range of patches that fit the idea of a metallic sound world, such as textures, swells, colossal hits and other FX patches.

CDM:From a business perspective, what’s next for Impact: Steel? Do you plan on marketing, licensing or selling the library to a larger company, what types of distribution, etc.

WR:At the moment, I’m handling all sales and marketing through my own sample development company, Impact Soundworks. I already have some other sample library ideas in mind for the months to come, so stay tuned!

CDM:Do you have any recommendations or advice for other composers or creators who might like to try their hand at creating a sample library?

WR:I think every composer should try and make some of their own samples, or at least tweak their existing commercial libraries so that they’re less recognizable. Ultimately I only made Impact: Steel just to give my own music a new and unique sound that hadn’t been done before. My advice to people trying to make a commercial library is to choose a subject that hasn’t been done a million times already, or at least take a different approach to it.

Our take: I’ve been playing with Impact:Steel for a little over a week now and it has already found a place in my regular sample library. As the demos on the site suggest, it works extremely well to add metallic flavor and impact to your compositions. I’ve found it really wants to be ‘played’ – that is, I find it hard to not want to smash my keys while I’m playing with the samples! Those with something like the M-Audio Trigger Finger or some Roland drum-pads will be greatly rewarded with the playability and musicality of this library. Here’s an excerpt from ambient demo I’m working on now, showcasing some of the ‘Clang Ensembles’ from Impact:Steel. Be sure to check out the official site for more. Enjoy!

Demo

Native Instruments has tweaked their Elektrik Piano, finally adding Universal Binary support for Intel Macs. Unlike the Vokator and Spektral Delay updates, though, there are some new features for everyone to enjoy. The samples are the same, but everything else has gotten an update:

1. Kontakt 2 Engine: EP now supports the excellent KONTAKT sampling engine. I’ve talked to several sound designers who feel this really is the best sampling engine around, so it’ll be great spending some time with the reworked EP to see how it performs.
2. New Models: New impulse-response room and cabinet simulations.
3. Mod FX: The mod wheel now controls new tremolo effects (A200, MK1, MK2), and wah (E7), and the E7 adds a “sound” knob that cycles through parameters, plus a damper mechanism model (via the sustain pedal).
4. Performance settings: Set dynamic range and randomize velocity, volume, and pitch. I still generally prefer modeling these components to randomizing them with recorded samples, but I’m interested to see how this works — and even how abusing it could create some new hybrid presets.
5. New voice allocation: Reduces CPU usage and, says NI, better models mechanical instruments.
6. 16 new presets: 16 new “authentic instruments” presets have been designed around the new modeling features.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, the new engine will mean losing your old presets and performance settings, so you will have to rework those. Fortunately, it’s an affordable update with lots of stuff inside (just about EP 2.0, really), at EUR/USD 25 (if you registered before 9/12/06) and free otherwise.

CDM’s resident game composer W. Brent Latta continues pouring over the epic choral sampling library that is EWQL’s Symphonic Libraries. In case you weren’t already impressed with its 9 DVDs of sounds, in this episode, Brent constructs actual words out of samples — the holy grail of synthetic vocals. -Ed.

WordBuilder is arguably the most significant piece of technology in the Choirs package. Sure – in terms of raw samples, there has never been a choir library this substantial. But more important is the ability to actually get the choir to say exactly what you want them to, without resulting to bland “Oooohs” and “Aaaaahs” or resulting to bland, pre-recorded phrases such as “Hallelujah”.

That said, our look at WordBuilder will be brief, only because the application is so deep that to fully explain its use and application would exceed the scope of a review and lead into something more of a tutorial.

As we discussed in the earlier episodes, we’re using Choirs along with Logic Pro 7 – thus we use WordBuilder in standalone mode. We fire up Logic, WordBuilder, and 4 instances of our Choirs Kompakt plugin (SATB), and begin our foray into building words. The first thing to understand about WordBuilder is that while a monophonic note-line will be routed in (from your controller or sequencer), WordBuilder will transmit much more MIDI data at output. Consider the word “sly”. The composer things of this as a single word or syllable, however WordBuilder must break this individual word into multiple segments, “s”, “l”, and “y” – each to be routed (with the same note value) to a different sample. Thus we can see that WordBuilder is a sophisticated MIDI processor, and harnessing its power is no small undertaking.

The incoming note from your controller or sequencer will have a velocity value that will be passed into each segment in WordBuilder. However, we can change the velocity of each segment on the fly in WordBuilder, if we so desire. Even more useful is the ability to set transitions between segments and phrases. As noted in the documentation, “singing the word ‘alone’ might need to be noticeably different than singing the phrase ‘a loan’, even though the sounds of the letters are the same and the notes on the staff identical.” WordBuilder allows the user several ways to specify transitions between phrases, the most flexible being “Text Entry” mode, where entering symbols into the text field will specify the type of transition between segments. “had a lit-tle =lamb” would yield slurring on the first word, staccato on the next 3 words, and a normal transition on the final word.

As a side-note, it should be mentioned that we can solo specific words or phrases to further hone and refine our performance. As we select a given syllable in the text field and click ‘Solo’ in WordBuilder, we then loop the particular notes in our sequencer, or simply play them in repeatedly from our controller.

Perhaps the most important functionality of WordBuilder – aside from assigning the actual text to be sung – lies in its ability to ‘learn’ the timing of the lyrics to be sung. There are two basic approaches: Change Speed, which actually adjusts the duration of each phonetic segment, and Draw Only, which merely indicates the length of each syllable in the timeline. Each one is useful in its own right. Change Speed is the most efficient way to get the choir to sing the lyrics with the melody you’ve written, though it is not necessarily precise enough to simply ’set-it-and-forget-it’. Draw Only doesn’t change the actual duration of the segments – that type of adjustment is up to the composer. What it does is give you a guideline, a foundation from which you can adjust and tweak the syllables to your hearts content. Personally, I’m the impatient type, so I’m going to be working with the Change Speed mode, with manual tweaking after the fact.

One nitpick I have with the documentation for WordBuilder – it constantly references the different colors of segments and notes, but the manual itself is in black and white. I realize that they assume the user will have the application open while they’re reading the manual, but that is a faulty assumption for some of us, who use our commute time (on the bus, mind you) to read through the documentation and our studio time to put it into practice.

It should also be noted that there is one cumbersome quandary in the WordBuilder system that makes it somewhat difficult to get the lyrics to come out the way you want. When a single word or syllable requires multiple notes, the composer must toggle a MIDI CC event – one for “Hold On” and one for “Hold Off”. These toggles are set in the options menu – completely separate from the learned timing system used elsewhere. This dislocation of the hold system from the rest of the timing system is frustrating. Surely there must be a better way to incorporate held syllables over multiple notes within the primary “learning” system. I certainly hope East West refines this feature in the future.

Here is a quick MP3 sample of the Lacrimosa phrase from Mozart’s requiem. As shown in the graphic, one must insert a separate syllable for the note to be held (the ‘a’).

lacrimosa.mp3

WordBuilder is a complex application, requiring proprietary syntax and a great deal of patience. However, it pays off in the end, and your results will be directly proportional to the amount of time you’re willing to spend refining your song. While I wish that it were easier for a composer to get a virtual choir to sing, I honestly can’t think of a more efficient or flexible way of doing it. East West has done an amazing job with this application, and I’m excited to share my results with you in our next, and FINAL installment.

Previously:
EWQL Symphonic Choirs Episode 2: Digging In
Review: EWQL Symphonic Choirs Sample Library, Episode 1 – The Arrival
[Ed.: We're currently correcting an error in the database that caused some mis-encoded characters in episode 1. Thanks for your patience. -PK]