Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Some music made with Linux
From: David Olofson (david_AT_olofson.net)
Date: Fri Feb 20 2004 - 06:23:05 EET
On Friday 20 February 2004 00.06, Pete Bessman wrote:
[...]
> Writing a guitar sound synthesizer that sounds good is a very
> difficult thing. The best one out there (the proprietary Slayer
> generator) sounds pretty crummy. Since this song is industrial,
> and the main gist of it is just a few guitar chords, using just a
> few samples of the guitar sounds and some creative song
> restructuring could produce excellent results.
Yeah, that was my first thought.
Another approach would be to record the unprocessed guitar sound,
compress/resynthesize that one way or another (plain audio, mp3,
custom tuned compression algos, resynthesis using using physical
modelling etc in increasing order of difficulty), and then apply
guitar FX and speaker emulator plugins on the result. I think the
most important part is to preserve the subtle details from the real
guitar sound, as the lack of realism in the playing technique is what
kills most synthesized guitars I've heard so far.
> So, if Audiality has or will have a sample player, I would use that
> for the guitar sounds (I'd be happy to provide clips).
No problem, though the current version supports only WAV files
(whatever formats SDL supports) and a custom raw format used for
caching sounds on disk. I'll add support for one or two audio file
libs soon, though.
> Otherwise,
> instead of trying to synthesize guitars, just come up with really
> gritty in face-melting synth sounds and use some of the
> aforementioned "creative song restructuring."
Yeah, that's probably a better idea, unless I can come up with some
very cool way of resynthesizing the real guitar sound. Generally, if
it is synthetic, it's a bad idea to pretend it isn't. Better try to
make it sound good than realistic.
> I don't know what your music hook up is like, but I would highly
> recommend listening to the sounds on "Exiled on Mainline" by
> Chemlab and "Edgecrusher (Urban Assault Mix)" by Fear Factory.
Dunno, really. I listen to most kinds of music, though the current
state of mainstream music has been driving me towards SIDs, other old
game music and related stuff over the last few years... (And I used
to write and listen to euro, pop techno and the like! *heh* I'm
finally starting to understand people that just generally hate
everything near "mainstream", no matter what that may be at the
time.)
Anyway, I found some sample mp3s and other audio files, and I like
what I hear. Guess I'll have to order some CDs... :-)
> I
> further recommend comparing the Fear Factory song against the
> original version to see how far "creative song restructuring" can
> get you.
You mean the original album version? Can't seem to find it...
//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
.- Audiality -----------------------------------------------.
| Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia. |
| MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... |
`-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -'
--- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---
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