Simple Gifts is a Shaker song from the mid-1800’s, with a lively melody. Set to new lyrics as Lord of the Dance it has been a popular song in Catholic and other liturgical congregations for the last 30 years or so. American composer Aaron Copland has…
Finally, after almost a year hiatus, the Djembe soundfont has been rolled out. To recap, I had given up on it after getting far enough for my daughter’s backing track – still not very happy with the results. Then, a fine independent producer doing a…
I got the next two syllables in on Tuesday night – Gun and Dun. I saved the soundfont and tried to load it into the Creative Soundfont manager. No go. I’ve had this problem before with soundfonts with very large single instruments. This one is…
A couple of quick things that I learned tonight – I can’t figure out how to delete samples from an instrument in Synthfont Viena – I accidentally imported all of the Go and Do samples twice. I e-mailed the creator to ask, but then found…
It was a busy Easter, so I didn’t get much done in the way of music or soundfont creation. I did work a bit tonight, so wanted to report what I have learned… I’m now at the point where I’m turning all of my individual…
Well, I’ve just performed a velocity test playing a standard MIDI set of congas. When I laid back, almost none of my velocities were under 90. When I played more aggressively, I peaked the meter at 127 numerous times. My digital piano has three velocity…
Last night I finally finished the “slicing and dicing” of the samples. I didn’t keep accurate track (I wish I had) of how long it exactly took, but it was on the order of 6 hours. This does not make it more likely that I…
I began slicing up the individual samples tonight. It’s going to take a while – two hours worth of work and I’m not quite 1/4 of the way done. I’m using a freeware program called Audacity to do the audio editing. It’s pretty boring work, but I observed…
When the recording was complete, we had 14 different drum hits and one sound effect, each with 10-15 samples of increasing volume, each with 3-4 takes. That’s a lot of samples. The first step in mixing these samples down was to come up with a consistent mix and…
The first part of creating a brand new soundont is the collection of the raw samples. In this case I wanted to sample an African drum called a djembe. I love the variety of tones that can be achieved from this drum in the hands…
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