Synful orchestra.. anyone try this yet?

[tonylombardi]

Wow, this thread really took off!! I figured you guys would be interested!

Just to clear things up, I'm not associated with Synful Orchestra in any way at all. The guy just sent me an email... apparently from my website. I'm not sure how he found me. Perhaps I somehow emailed him in the past. So I didn't do any of the demos.

I guess I need to listen to the string demo. I only listened to the other ones. I agree that this technology definitely has a huge promise even though it's not 100% realistic currently. The biggest thing is the amount of time it could save in the area of MIDI programming.

I guess I'll email him back and tell him to put a few words in here if he can.

[tonylombardi]

Just listened to the string demo. Quite good! Everything was pretty realistic. The cello could be a little better, but for synthesis it's very good.

[Tumababa]

It looks like in a few years physical modelling will have finally caught up to sampling. If it weren't so damned expensive I might be tempted to buy synful. I need some woodwinds to replace my rusty AO.

[R. Glenn]

Interesting.

Btw...has anyone discovered how to make a continous one note crescendo/decrescendo with timbre changes and not just increasing/decreasing volume?

Seems to me the only thing affecting timbre is velocity? One might get away by faking it with volume only...but when it is modeled like this, it would seem a shame not to have that assigned to a continous controller as well...as it should be pretty easily implemented.

Apologies if I missed something obvious...it's 3 am and I'm pretty tired now.

Ah well, time for bed...more experimenting tomorrow.

Cheers

Rodney

[Kanjika]

Ive noticed that on the trumpet, vibrato intensity and timbre varies slightly if you play the same note twice...attacks are pretty much the same though.

[Joseph Burrell]

Rodney, I noticed the same thing here. First impressions being what they are, I'm not entirely impressed. One gets better 'plug and play' results from a regular sample library than you do with this synth. I wonder how much time actually went into those demos since some of the claims on the site just aren't true. For the price being what it is, I don't see a lot of investment potential from where I'm standing. The sound was very 'soundfont' to me. It went absolutely crazy on some tunes that I have with pitchbend in them so obviously there's something not right there. The brass was very harsh at higher velocities and the soundset is pretty limited really. Those demos sure were impressive though. I'd love to see the midi files. Just to see how much data there actually is in them. With the expression delay, this won't be something you'll want to play live at any rate. Interesting stuff, nonetheless. I'd like to hear what others make out of it. Even though this didn't float my boat, I still think physical modelling is the way to go. But still I think there's going to have to be a solid foundation of real samples though, before you get entirely convincing results out of it. There's real sound driving this thing, but I just think there aren't enough of them. But, eh, what do I know.

[Kanjika]

The beethoven quartet Midi comes with the demo. Theres nothing...nothing. Its a plain midi.

How the hell do they get those longer portamentos and slides? I havent been able to do that...the expression delay does some, but not enough

[Videohlper]

Guys:

Just a comment from a jaded,tired hard-to-please sample horse:

This program is awesome. Sure, alone it can sound a little "off" and synthy. But have YOU taken the time to combine it with EWQLSO (AT LOW volume)? Holy crap, this thing adds a buttload of nuances that used to take me two hours to pull off. Tried it with VSL, too -- but works far better with the brighter,more "hyped" EWQL sound. Would probably work well with Kirk Hunter's stuff, too.

This program (at least after playing with it for two hours) is going to make a huge difference in a bunch of people's lives. Especially those of us who score under a tremendous time constraint.

I haven't been thius impressed with a synthesis-based emulator in quite a while. Last time was when I heard some Yamaha guy play the VL-1.

ALSO: The program does work with V-Stack.

Stew

[Eric Lindemann]

Hi all,

I’ve worked on Synful Orchestra for about eight years so it’s very gratifying to see all this discussion.

My experience with samplers goes back to around 1983 and my first large sampler design was for a company called Waveframe in 1986. At that time I was already frustrated with the limitations of samplers. In 1987-88 I experimented for a while with physical modeling (some of you might know this type of technology as waveguides) but I abandoned that approach in 1988. I came back to the problem of music synthesis around 1996-1997 with a determination to do something about what I saw as the limitations of samplers and sample libraries. Synful Orchestra is the result.

Synful Orchestra is not a sample library.
Synful Orchestra is not a physical modeling synthesizer.

I call the Synful technology Reconstructive Phrase Modeling (RPM). This is not a hype marketing term. Synful Orchestra with RPM really is new and different in the way it generates sounds. There is a page on www.synful.com on RPM technology that discusses how Synful Orchestra works. There is more detail in the Users Manual and for the truly insane there are the three patents referenced on the web site.

I want to be able to play natural instrument sounds from a MIDI keyboard (or other controller or sequencer) using standard controls (Volume, Mod, Pitch-Wheel, Velocity) in a convincing expressive manner. I want this to be a musical experience without a lot of editing, pushing of special buttons, program changes, pushing special keys, applying special phrasing tools, etc (programming as we call it). When I play legato I want it to sound legato as it would on the instrument I’m simulating When I play detached I want it to sound detached.

There are several reasons this is not possible with samplers (no matter what the library).

1) The samplers and libraries do not have the variety of note articulations and especially note transitions reflected in real instruments. (I don’t think making such a library would be practical but I’ll discuss that another time).

2) The samplers and libraries are not able to sustain notes for an indefinite length of time, looping does not sound convincing.

3) One cannot change the character of a note in a natural and convincing way while the note is being sustained.

4) There is not a continuum of timbre from loud to soft as in a real instrument – we have 2-4 “velocity levels” – but what happens when the loudness changes during sustain?

5) The samplers and libraries do not have convincing control over vibrato so controlling vibrato onset in an expressive manner is unconvincing.

6) The samplers and libraries have no natural strategy for adjusting articulation according to the players phrasing. Your obliged to use a bunch of supplementary meta commands to select between a very limited set of articulation alternatives (legato and non-legato) and dynamics.

I believe the last point could be improved somewhat (although not sufficiently) with smarter samplers but the first 5 points cannot be addressed by current sampler technology because they require a more flexible representation of sound than traditional PCM sampling.

In Synful Orchestra sounds are not represented in memory as a string of PCM samples as they are in a sampler. They are represented as time-varying sine waves (harmonics) plus noise elements (attack and transition noises and sustain noises – bow and breath).

This “additive parametric” representation has several advantages:

1) You can change the pitch of sounds without altering temporal envelopes such as the shape of an attack or note transition, the rate of vibrato etc.
2) You can splice sounds in a very smooth fashion without getting a click or the kind of wah that occurs with a cross-fade (which is due to phase cancellation).

In order to get a wide variety of phrasing and articulation, and note transitions Synful does a lot of splicing and pitch shifting of elements from its RPM phrase database and this splicing doesn’t always occur at the beginning of notes. The additive representation allows us to do that in a smooth way. The traditional sampler PCM format does not.

Synful Orchestration leverages the parametric additive representation to sustain notes in an intelligent “statistically sophisticated” manner. No loops. This would be impossible using a PCM representation.

With the parametric additive representation Synful Orchestration changes the timbre when the Volume pedal changes so you can create convincing crescendi and diminuendi. This would not be possible with traditional PCM sampling.

In Synful Orchestra the mod wheel controls vibrato in an “organic” manner. Real vibrato affects all the harmonics of a sound in a complex way (it’s not just pitch and volume) so if your going to increase or decrease vibrato with the Mod wheel you need to have control over the harmonics.

Synful orchestra has a complex algorithm for selecting what note transition or piece of note sustain or attack etc (what I call phrase fragments) to use in a given context as a function of input MIDI controls. This is very much more complicated then selected a p-mf-ff legato or non-legato sample. But this system wouldn’t work unless Synful could “morph” the selected fragment in pitch and duration and timbre to fit the context. This morphing is not possible with the traditional PCM sampling representation.

There are other issues that Synful addresses (like natural portamento) but you can look at the docs or the website to find out about this.

Bye for now,

Eric Lindemann

[Eric Lindemann]

I sent this email to alot of you who downloaded from the Synful website but since I got a bunch of unknown address returns I'll repeat it here.

We discovered an install problem that has been an issue for some people.

Here is the solution:

Move the files:

mfc70.dll
mscvp70.dll
mscvr70.dll

from your root directory (for example c:\) to c:\windows\system32.

These files are three Windows system files. The Synful install incorrectly put them in the root. If you use a different folder other than \windows for your operating system (for example \winnt) then place them in the system32 subfolder of your operating system folder (for example \winnt\system32)

Many of you will already have these files in \windows\system32 because many different programs place them there. In that case you can simply delete them from the root directory.

The synful_orchestra_setup.exe file on the website has been updated with the new install location for these files so if you prefer you can download again and reinstall (however this would take alot of time).

We apologize for this confusion and any frustration we may have caused you. Synful Orchestra is a new program so these are startup glitches.

Thanks,

Eric Lindemann