FF Trumpets?

[A_Sapp]

Does there exist a library with REAL fortissimo trumpets? SAM doesn't. SI doesn't. VSL doesn't. Dan Dean Solo Brass is the only one I know of with some real sizzle, but too closely-miced. Why is it that developers hold back with the trumpets?

[Lux]

some layers of ewqlso trumpets are really loud and sharp on ff, compared to libs you mentioned. To me they are the nearest to what youre looking for.

Luca

[lukpcn]

Maybe it's a good idea to layer for example Dan Deans FF close miced FF trumps with EWQLGOLD Trumpets... ? just a hint.

If I want to sound EWQL GOLD more close and bright are layer it with GPO.... :cool:

[Herman Witkam]

Does there exist a library with REAL fortissimo trumpets? SAM doesn't.
Well, SAM's fortissimo's are pretty loud and crispy, especially if you use the close mikes. I haven't heard any more powerful trumpets in a library yet.

[Tomke]

Why is it that developers hold back with the trumpets?
Probably because this kind of playing is not a part of tha classical idiom. Garritan's big band thing, which is around the corner, will probably contain some screaming. But when doing a classical lib, you take into account that if you write ff for the brass in a classical orchestra, the musicians play loud but they don't overblow their instruments, cracking the tone up wide open, turning it into "screaming" ff - unless specifically called for. That was considered "savage" playing :p

DD is the best I've heard with this, but it should not be too difficult to do it even better. Then again, 4 trumpets playing parts in screaming FF has a nasty tendency of sounding like a loud harmonica.

[Bruce A. Richardson]

What exactly are you looking to accomplish? Since you have some really nice libraries, I think it is likely you can do some engineering and get what you want.

You can probably bridge the difference between what you're getting and what you want by judiciously automating a little EQ into the track. Waves TransX is another secret weapon when it comes to ratcheting up the aggressiveness of a line.

As a trumpet player myself, I don't see much mystery in the "why" of this. If someone told me to blast the plating off my horn for twenty-thirty seconds a pop, I'd tell them to go to hell. I have never had any problem telling a conductor or bandleader that he needs to either readjust his expectations of my physical sacrifice, or find someone with less brains to bleed for him. Trumpet players have to do this all the time...people are always screaming for more. And trust me, I can totally peel paint when I have to do it. That is not enough for some people. You can feel it when you're being pushed into physically destructive territory, and you become quite accustomed to standing up for yourself in that situation.

And blasting like that through an entire sampling session would be a totally different thing than actually playing a line on a gig, which might last for five or ten seconds, then be done. You'd have to blast for three or four times that amount just to get a good fortissimo take and a couple of alternates on ONE NOTE in a sampling session.

So, I think one consideration is simply that no one is going to wreck their chops for the glory of an acid-tone fortissimo layer. And most producers are seasoned enough professionals themselves, and understanding enough human beings not to demand it. Or they've been told to go to hell enough times that they're not going to push it.

The reason Dan Dean got that fortissimo is simple enough. First, it's Allen Vizzutti, who has more chops than any 15 orchestral players combined. The guy's a machine. Second, he's a friend of Dan's and is more likely not to tell Dan to drop dead at the request. Third...well, anyone with decent ears should be able to figure it out. It ain't like Vizzutti's is the most unrecognizable tone on the planet.

And frankly, that FFF layer is all but unusable, precisely because it is played FAR beyond the ability of even Mr. Vizzutti to hold the tone together. On a real line, you'd play a careful airstream shape up to a brief pinnacle of that kind of tone. You wouldn't blast it from beginning to end. I'm not faulting Allen or Dan for it, not a bit. But in the final analysis, it didn't constitute the best layer of the library, and it's not that easy to use in a musical context--AND it has little to do with the microphone position and much more to do with the basic fact that a player simply doesn't play FFF that way in broad chunks. There's much more shape to it, much more specificity to the line.

Try some EQ...seriously. If you automate an EQ in the 3-6k, range, and carefully shape it to the line, you can get essentially the same tonal shaping that a player would apply...only no one has to bleed.

[SiliconAudioLabs]

I think I know what Aaron's after here. It's that full force sustain of a group of trumpets during scenes in a movie where there's a BIIIIIIG ship or planet coming up on the screen in full majesty. The trumpets SCA-REAM in, usually some octaves with a third thrown in, a full blast suss.

One reason we don't get them in these libraries is because of the WAY the players do this. What they do is point the bells upwards towards the ceiling (some over heads at this point moved to front -top- sound stage by muting the directs where applicable).

This diffuses the whole mess and makes it more usable in the piece.

Dan Dean's stuff is the only stuff I've heard that comes close (love ya Dan). And as Bruce said the palyers have got to be "TOP NOTCH" to do this.

Anyway, they then let ripp. FULL ON RIPP!!! Because it's so "full on" the lengths are not too long and some of the players will delay to allow the others to take a breath and continue. Not really circular breathing per say but circular playing. And there's usually no port or pop at the front of the note.

Sometimes the trombones will join this process as well.

[jc5]

Hmmm.... what I have found lacking even in the best libraries, are f or ff sustains with a very sharp initial attack - no mild crescendo, but instant volume. There are moments when you really need that...
Of course, as Bruce said, even this can be achieved through some mild tinkering.
But who knows, maybe one day I'll get fed up and just make some of my own private samples of that particular sound... ;)

[Evan Gamble]

As a trumpet player myself, I don't see much mystery in the "why" of this. If someone told me to blast the plating off my horn for twenty-thirty seconds a pop, I'd tell them to go to hell. I have never had any problem telling a conductor or bandleader that he needs to either readjust his expectations of my physical sacrifice, or find someone with less brains to bleed for him. Trumpet players have to do this all the time...people are always screaming for more. And trust me, I can totally peel paint when I have to do it. That is not enough for some people. You can feel it when you're being pushed into physically destructive territory, and you become quite accustomed to standing up for yourself in that situation.



I found This Hilarious...I'm a trumpet player as well and I know Aaron is too. Growing up in a Marching Band environment has put me in many situations where the band leader has asked for MORE MORE MORE. I wish I'd have told him to go to hell then....BWHAHAHAHAHAHA

Seriously though I don't know if the garritan Library will suffice with its screaming horns...the insane register samples sound like Wayne Bergeron as opposed to Arturo Sandoval :(

But I don't think Aaron was referring to Screaming Trumpets...simply loud...I think your going to have to sample that one yourself aaron..hehehe :cool:

[Bruce A. Richardson]

Hmmm.... what I have found lacking even in the best libraries, are f or ff sustains with a very sharp initial attack - no mild crescendo, but instant volume. There are moments when you really need that...
Of course, as Bruce said, even this can be achieved through some mild tinkering.
But who knows, maybe one day I'll get fed up and just make some of my own private samples of that particular sound... ;)

One trick that I use (and I know King Idiot does it, too) is to export samples that blossom this way, and load them up into a wave editor. Sony's Vegas is actually the easiest environment I've found for this. You make a cut right after the attack transient, cut out the "ramp up" and then reattach the attack to the full-bore tone.

Obviously, some experimentation and tweaking is needed to get this sounding exactly right, but it's not hard. At that time, you can also apply envelopes, and shape the notes exactly how you want them.

Then you just save off the edited samples to a new subdirectory (with the same sample names) and re-import them into the sampler.

Somewhere I have a whole set of altered Miroslav brass samples altered in this way. Not for the faint of heart or the purists, but it gets the job done.

[JonFairhurst]

One trick that I use (and I know King Idiot does it, too) is to export samples that blossom this way, and load them up into a wave editor. Sony's Vegas is actually the easiest environment I've found for this. You make a cut right after the attack transient, cut out the "ramp up" and then reattach the attack to the full-bore tone.

I'd never thought of using Vegas that way. Cool.

I'm a bit confused about the process though.. If you look at the waveform from an ADSR perspective, are you talking about removing/shortening the A or the D or both?

-JF

[Bruce A. Richardson]

I'd never thought of using Vegas that way. Cool.

I'm a bit confused about the process though.. If you look at the waveform from an ADSR perspective, are you talking about removing/shortening the A or the D or both?

-JF

I think you understand, but just to be clear, I'm talking about literally removing something between attack and decay.

But decay is really confusing in this case, because the decay is really more of a blossoming of tone up to the full "sustain" level. What we want to do in this case is preserve the full physical articulation of the "attack" but to cut out what is actually a defect in the articulation--that the attack was not backed with enough immediate air to avoid what we call the "sucking" phenomenon, where one note won't proceed musically to the next because the intensity drains out.

One can't really blame it too much on the player, because it's just very difficult to think note-to-note while sitting in a trying studio situation, playing notes which are very much out of any musical context at all.

There is also the basic problem that the realtime cues a player uses to gauge his attack and air intensity are provided by the musical context and the presence of other players surrounding him. Those of us who have played in large ensembles know how this works...that after a hard concert, you're likely to walk up to one of your colleagues, and say, "Hey, what the hell happened at xxx place? You had me totally pinned down." So much of a performance is dependent upon everything else, that when you extract a player--who is probably not technologically aware of exactly how his session will be mapped and used--from all aural cues, and expect to get the right articulations...well, it's a hard thing. You have to be a really good producer, and you have to know a lot of things, both technical and musical, to run a sampling session and get what you need.

And even if you are all of those things as a producer, there will still be some problems that slip through, because you either didin't hear them coming, or you couldn't get the players to the place you needed...the rather depressing case where you know you're walking out of the session without everything you needed.

That's when you start defensively editing, as is being directed here.

I mentioned Miroslav's brass, because that was a classic example of his having run sessions for a very specific musical need, then he created a marketable product as essentially an afterthought. He didn't have everything he needed, and one of the primary things was a brass section which did not "blossom" the attacks. There are times when this blossoming is the perfect articulation, but not when you want a firmly tongued line which is backed by a lot of air--but which is not shaped like a marcato. Those articulations would look like rectangles on the waveform if drawn as an example, and they are commonly played--in ensemble--but not very commonly played by a solo player sitting in isolation. So they tend not to be the way a session player will perform in the sampling session, and as a producer, you have to know enough about wind performance to actually direct and instruct this type of playing to be executed. The player must essentially imagine he is pounding out a lead line on March Slav or some other piece which demands an "over the top of the ensemble" tone and articulation.

So....

Back to the edit, what you're trying to do is essentially cut out the "ramp up" to the full tone, and to reattach the attack in such a way that it sounds plausibly performed. You must zoom in tight enough to actually see the repeating characteristic waveform of the instrument's tone, and to make your splice in a place which falls "into the pattern." And then, you do some listening and experimenting to make sure you've created something musically plausible. Usually that will involve leaving just a bit of the "ramp," because no player will go to absolute full backpressure in an instant. It is helpful to study waveforms of notes which DO successfully sound full from the attack, to get an idea what the "ideal" attack shape looks like as a waveform. From there, it's easy to interpolate this to the sample at hand, and to have a better first-stab at it.

Strings look different from brass which look different from woodwinds. So every class of instrument needs a separate and distinctive analysis, unless you're purposefully making Frankenstein-monsters. Which is fun as well.

Does that explain it better? The reason Vegas works so darn well for this is that it's the best auto-crossfading interface around, and you can see very clearly what is happening to the combined waveform at the splicepoint.

The reason I have always been so adamantly opposed to protection schemes which lock the user out of the waveforms is this very technique. Sampling is so malleable if you learn just a few basic tricks of editing--the sky is truly the limit. You can easily export waveforms, even from totally different libraries, and load them up as tracks on a timeline, creating new ensemble sounds, panning things into multiple instances of convolvers and creating release samples...there is just no limit, as long as you are not locked out.

It has always struck me as ludicrous that anyone would imagine this would lead to piracy. Pirates are just so NOT into this level of creativity and creation--if anything they are the polar opposite, channeling creativity into absolute waste. It is sad that the most creative among us must bear the consequences of the least creative.

But that's another subject, eh?

Hopefully, that clears up the technique I'm referring to.

[JonFairhurst]

Awesome description! As a hobbyist with a wife and three teenagers, I'm a bit sample poor. But as a technologist, I'm not afraid to dig into the guts of this stuff.

I've got one brass lib in particular that has so-so attacks. I had tried juicing the attack in the sampler as an attempt to remedy it, but it wasn't very effective. I've got some new ideas to make this lib suit my style better.

The coolest thing is the idea of using Vegas as a waveform editor. I've always gone to Sound Forge for that, but you're right. Vegas' ability to chop and crossfade is perfect for the job, and I can use all of the same DX plugins in Vegas as I can in SF.

Thanks for the tips!

-JF

[jc5]

The reason I have always been so adamantly opposed to protection schemes which lock the user out of the waveforms is this very technique. Sampling is so malleable if you learn just a few basic tricks of editing--the sky is truly the limit. You can easily export waveforms, even from totally different libraries, and load them up as tracks on a timeline, creating new ensemble sounds, panning things into multiple instances of convolvers and creating release samples...there is just no limit, as long as you are not locked out.

It has always struck me as ludicrous that anyone would imagine this would lead to piracy. Pirates are just so NOT into this level of creativity and creation--if anything they are the polar opposite, channeling creativity into absolute waste. It is sad that the most creative among us must bear the consequences of the least creative.

But that's another subject, eh?

Hopefully, that clears up the technique I'm referring to.

Excellent, extremely informative post.
I have also been using Vegas for some audio applications over the years - it is remarkably useful. The new surround sound features of the latest versions add even more possibilities..

What you say about ensemble creation is absolutely true - I did this some time ago to create some chamber strings patches. I took all the solo string samples I had, recorded some new ones myself, and then put it all together. The result was very pleasing indeed. Yes it is a great deal of work, but if you are financially restricted OR you are looking for something very specific, this can get you what you need.
This is a more obvious (though extremely useful, obviously) example of ensemble creation, but the possibilities really are endless.

I think I will do as you say Bruce, and try editing some of the trumpet samples I have to get that sound before resorting to my own less than stellar horn playing. ;)

P.S.
Regarding the continuing ironies of excessive protection schemes - once the pirate has ripped it open, he WILL have acess to all the samples. On the other hand, the legitimate paying user will not. Ahh.....

[KingIdiot]

One trick that I use (and I know King Idiot does it, too) is to export samples that blossom this way, and load them up into a wave editor. Sony's Vegas is actually the easiest environment I've found for this. You make a cut right after the attack transient, cut out the "ramp up" and then reattach the attack to the full-bore tone.

Obviously, some experimentation and tweaking is needed to get this sounding exactly right, but it's not hard. At that time, you can also apply envelopes, and shape the notes exactly how you want them.

Then you just save off the edited samples to a new subdirectory (with the same sample names) and re-import them into the sampler.

Somewhere I have a whole set of altered Miroslav brass samples altered in this way. Not for the faint of heart or the purists, but it gets the job done.


Its one of my favorite tricks

An interview of mine , that, mysteriously disappeared on this site, had detailed pctures and descriptions of how to do this in vegas. I expect I'll dedicate some more focus on this technique in a future article for Virtual Instruments Magazine.

Two tools I cant live without when editing at the sample level are

Vegas and Wavelab

other ones are quickkeys, Seamless Looper and beatcreator

used all in combination you can almost automate most library editing.

remember that trumpets and trombones in particular have a pretty consistant waveform shape and you can even reverse the sample, and add it to the end of the edit, to make the FF part o the crecendo just a little bit longer, or to give it a bit of randomness in any Xfades you might build. Just watch out for phasing/comb filter effects since....again the wavforms are pretty consistant.

[dwdonehoo]

An interview of mine , that, mysteriously disappeared on this site, had detailed pictures and descriptions of how to do this in vegas.

Yes, I would like to know where this one got off to. If anyone has archived this interview, send it to me and I will re-post it.

FF trumpets, eh? It begs the question, "In relation to what?" Or is it just a matter of the attacks? In any case, with SAM and KH in particular, I have never had trouble getting ff trumpets. For the "in your face" ff, it does seem to be a matter of production: some of the "Hollywood" sound stuff I have tried to emulate has obviously been altered.

[kitekrazy]

One can't really blame it too much on the player, because it's just very difficult to think note-to-note while sitting in a trying studio situation, playing notes which are very much out of any musical context at all.


Great observation.