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And it needs to be said and repeated. Only to the person who is familiar with the instrument gets hyper critical about it. <...>



In the wind synthesis community we call this Home Instrument Bias (HIB). If you play an instrument, your ears have been trained to hear what that instrument can and cannot do. This makes it easy to detect a fake.

Emulating another instrument to me is much like a comedian doing an impression of a famous person. No two people sound exactly alike, and many times the impressionist doesn't sound close to the famous person he or she is "doing". But by capturing the nuances of that famous person's speech patterns, the audience will instantly recognize the famous person the comedian is doing.

So to me emulating various instruments is studying how they express themselves. Various things come to mind, here are just a few things of the thousands I have learned: guitar vibrato starts on pitch goes up and back down to pitch and not below (unless using the whammy bar which is a different emulation) ... guitar hammer-ons and pull-offs require a legato mode on the synthesizer ... guitars often play sharp because it is difficult to play a note pressing the string at a 90 degree angle to the fretboard and not too hard to bend it between the frets ... even more extreme than guitar old time country/Cajun fiddlers were rarely in tune, so sloppy intonation adds to the realistic effect ... trumpet players often use lip slurs (easy to emulate with the VL70) ... trumpet tone changes drastically with volume and pitch ... sax players use various techniques to articulate a note (too many to go into here) ... sax vibrato is seldom "mechanical" but varies in both timing and intensity during the duration of the note ... the sax changes tone as it moves above and below the pitch while playing vibrato ... and so on and so on and so on. I think emulation not only trains your ears to be a better listener, but is something that always has a new discovery waiting for you just around the corner.

So the idea of doing a convincing emulation is to (1) study the way the instrument you are emulating gets it's individual expression (2) study your synth patch and discover which of those nuances you can emulate (3) study your synth patch and discover which nuances it can do that cannot be done by the instrument you are doing an impression of (4) lean heavily on the nuances in step 2 and avoid the ones in step 3.

The holy grail of synthesis is to fool a player of the instrument you are doing. I've done this at least 3 times.

1) I was playing a party outdoors by the swimming pool. The host was a good guitar player. The host was tending the guests indoors, while his wife was tending the guests outdoors. I played a "guitar" solo on the wind synth (this was before I started bringing a guitar to the gig). The host came out to the pool area to see the guitar player that was sitting in with us and was very surprised to see me playing wind synth.

2) We were playing in the lounge of a country club. The people in the dining room could hear us but could not see us due to a partial wall. A trumpet player came out of the dining room to see who was playing trumpet with us.

These are the two I know about, because the players came up to me and commented on my emulations, telling me their side of the experience.

And now for the "crowing glory"

3) When I decided to learn lead guitar, I joined a couple of Guitar forums (much like this BiaB forum). I asked a lot of questions, got to be friends with many of the other members, they all know my main instruments sax and wind synth. In fact my avatar is me playing the sax. About a year and a half later, I posted this link http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/_oldtimeguitar.mp3 -- I told them I played it (but not what I played it with) and asked for their opinion. I got replies like "It was Jeff Beck-ish", "You've applied your musical abilities to the guitar very well", "Great playing" and so on. Nobody questioned the fact that it wasn't played on the guitar. After I confessed my "crime" I got a lot of good natured teasing and only one person said that he thought the guitar sounded a little bit funny, something about the vibrato.

These emuations were also done with the Physical Modeling synth module, which doesn't capture perfect tone, but does emulate the nuances of those instruments much better than any sampler. I couldn't have fooled them with a sampler.

While the quest for new sounds is admirable, and easy (just fork over the $$$), the quest to learn how to emulate various instruments while being more difficult, produces greater results.

So if your sax, trumpet, guitar, or whatever sounds off, as long as the tone is "in the ball park", the problem won't be cured by a more realistic sounding voice, it will be cured by manipulating the patch you are using to emulate the nuances of the instrument you are doing an impression of.

Insights and incites by Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

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