dcuny wrote:Differentiating an "up" strum from a "down" strum isn't an advanced technique, it's basic.
True!
dcuny wrote:And while your Computer Science background and development of advanced software may give you a different perspective, to my (apparently uneducated) ears, the guitar strums are unmusical, mechanical, and unusable.
If what I wrote appeared to question your hearing and understanding of guitar, then I apologize, for sure . . .
For sure! My intent was to focus on determining what is practical to do within the capabilities of Notion 3, where it is important to understand that at present my focus primarily is on
DISCO and
Pop songs . . .
dcuny wrote:NOTION does many other things brilliantly, so it's an unfortunate oversight.
In some respects, it depends on each person's perspective, which is fine with me, and it also depends on the specific genre, but I do not consider it to be an "oversight", because while it is virtually trivial to do on a real guitar, I am not convinced that it is trivial to do in the virtual instrument universe, where "it" in this instance is upward and downward strumming, although as noted in my previous reply, it appears that the Fab Four Instrument Collection (EWQL) has up stroke and down stroke guitar samples, as well as various types of finger-picking samples, which might make it trivial to do depending on whether one can specify upward and downward strums with music notation in Notion 3 in a way that maps to the EWQL VSTi instrument actually doing upward and downward strums, where "trivial" maps to what essentially is $350 (US), which here in the sound isolation studio is not so trivial, really . . .
Really!I would expect a saxophone player to be a bit more attuned to the finer aspects of saxophone notation and samples, and I think that the requirements are a bit less stringent for electric guitar in the
DISCO,
Heavy Metal,
Pop, and
Rock and Roll genres, but I also think that the requirements are more stringent for acoustic guitar, especially when there are not so many other instruments . . .
[
NOTE: If there is a general rule, it probably is that the more instruments and voices, the less it matters, since everything tends to blend and to blur, but the fewer instruments, the more it matters, especially for acoustic guitar, as well as some styles of Jazz electric guitar. And it will be quite a while before any virtual guitars are able to sound like Paco de Lucía in the Flamenco guitar arena (a personal favorite) . . . ]
Picking and strumming is a major aspect of playing guitar (acoustic and electric), and when I think about it in an immediately conscious way the fact of the matter is that I have very specific uses for downward strums, upward strums, and arpeggios, as well as chord slides, but most of the time I do not think about it so much, preferring instead to do it intuitively in real-time on the fly, and while I generally avoid composing lead guitar solos in advance, it is not unusual for me to work on a rhythm guitar pattern for several weeks, with the work being a combination of (a) selecting and sequencing chords and (b) developing a rhythmic strumming and picking pattern . . .
However, when I am doing music notation for guitar, I focus more on chords and phrases but without a lot of attention to how the chords and phrases are strummed and picked, since for the most part I am quite happy when I get the sound of the guitar the way I want it . . .
After pondering it for a while, I am not certain that I would have had any specific thoughts about strumming and picking for virtual guitars, and the only thing that comes to mind regarding picking involves certain types of single or double note phrases that need emphasis and have special timing considerations, where an example is the slowly ascending guitar counterpoint lines in "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" (Beatles) . . .
OBSERVATIONIn some respects, I think that at least in theory it is possible to transcribe anything that can be played on an instrument, but there are so many articulations, nuances, techniques, and so forth and so on that in the grand scheme of everything it is not very practical for several reasons, including the facts (a) that every real instrument is unique, which is the case even with keyboard synthesizers manufactured by robots, (b) that every musician is unique, and (c) that the level of detail required to map a Gestalt is vast to the point of being essentially impractical based on currently available technologies . . .
So, instead of focusing on using Notion 3 as a vehicle for giving extraordinarily precise instructions to real musicians, my focus is much simpler . . .
Essentially, I view Notion 3 as a musical drawing tool, similar to the way Photoshop is used to draw pictures . . .
Notion 3 has tools, palettes of instruments, and so forth and so on, and it has a rendering engine that assembles the musical "drawing" for listening . . .
The Computer Science aspect comes into play as the result of knowing without doubt that behind the scenes everything happens according to algorithms on digital computers, so for example while it might be philosophically intriguing to think that there is an infinite range of something on a computer, the reality is that it always is finite, even when it is virtually infinite, because it is
constructed illusion . . .
So, instead of expecting Notion 3 to adjust itself to what I want to do, my approach is to discover how to adjust what I want to do in a way that is consistent with the Notion 3 capabilities of which I am aware and have verified, and from this perspective I do not consider Notion 3 and virtual instruments to be substitutes or replacements for real instruments . . .
From a different perspective, it is like Crayola crayons, where there are different sets and, with perhaps a few exceptions, everything is very discrete in the sense of a standard pack of 64 Crayola crayons having 64 distinct and clearly defined colors . . .
You can do a bit of blending and other techniques, but if you need an in-between color, at some point you need to devise a way to create your own unique crayon . . .
GUITAR PALETTEAfter pondering the general concepts of strumming guitar strings, I think that it might make a bit of sense to devise a way to do upward and downward strumming, as well as being able to gradually strum chords as if the notes of the chords were arpeggios, and this might be a nice suggestion for a future version of Notion, since it makes sense and is something that guitar players do for very specific reasons . . .
But rather than attribute the absence of specific upward and downward strumming to an "oversight", I prefer to consider it from the perspective of what in the computer programming universe is referred to as the art of controlling "scope creep", where it is nice to be able to do everything but the reality is that it is better to do something well than to do everything badly or not at all . . .
And after doing a bit of researching and thinking on how one might create a set of user-defined custom guitar strumming and picking samples, my current perspective is that I simply do not know enough about the specific requirements from a programming perspective to determine whether it is a relatively easy task or an extraordinarily complex task, although I tend to think that it is extraordinarily complex . . .
My current understanding of Notion 3 is that whatever is heard is the result of several things, some of which are emulated by processing computer algorithms but others of which are done simply by playing different samples of articulations, where some of this is done behind the scenes in the MIDI universe, which at present is a bit of a mystery here in the sound isolation studio . . .
Without going into too much detail, I did an experiment earlier this year or perhaps last year with French Horns, and at one point I had a Miroslav Philharmonik French Horn COMBI loaded with a set of perhaps 8 different French Horn articulations, and my recollection is that depending on the way the music notation was articulated, different French Horn "instruments" played the notes, so instead of one "instrument" in the COMBI playing all the notes, the specific instrument playing at any given time from the set of 8 instruments varied depending on the articulation, so I think this is the way it works behind the scenes, although at present I have not delved into this in much if any depth . . .
To be a bit more specific, I think that I had a staccato French Horn and a few other French Horn articulations loaded in the COMBI, and when there was a staccato note, it was played by the staccato French Horn in the COMBI, but regular notes were played by another French Horn instrument in the COMBI, and this was FUN to watch, since when the standalone user interface for Miroslav Philharmonik is visible, its mini-keyboard shows the notes as they are played, and the selected "instrument" is high-lighted in the list as it is played, so if you position everything correctly, you can see how the music notation in Notion 3 maps to notes on the mini-keyboard and "instruments" in the COMBI list, which is quite fascinating to watch in real-time, and it helps me to develop perspectives on the horizontal and vertical mappings of intervals, where for me a keyboard has a horizontal mapping for intervals, but a musical staff (for example, the treble clef) has a primarily vertical mapping for intervals, which is one of the things that makes it a bit difficult to devise a mental mapping for lead guitar, since from this perspective each string of a guitar essentially is a keyboard but since there are six strings on a standard guitar there are six
stacked keyboards, so there also is a vertical component, except that the stacked keyboards are offset, and the high-pitch "
G" string to high-pitch "
b" string interval makes it all the stranger and illogical in some respects, which is compounded by the fact that most people do not realize that it is very illogical from a mathematical and geometric perspective until sometime after they have learned so many chords and lead guitar phrases that it simply makes no practical sense to correct the problem, if there is a way to correct the problem, which I suppose is possible, at least in theory, but so what . . .
So what! With this bit of information in mind, it is important to understand that Notion 3 has what I think is an unique ability with respect to guitar, which as best as I have been able to determine only happens with the Notion 3 virtual guitar . . .
Specifically, the guitar in Notion 3 supports elaborate guitar tab articulations, gestures, and other techniques, including string bends, vibrato, whammying, and so forth . . .
I have no idea how this is done behind the scenes, but I have a few guesses, and for this reason I think that practical considerations were the determining factor with respect to controlling "scope creep" and to deciding which techniques were most important in the grand scheme of everything . . .
Guitar Tab Articulations ~ Notion 3As best as I have been able to determine, these guitar tab articulations are very
specific to the Notion 3 guitar, which is based primarily on attempting to use them with a virtual guitar from SampleTank 2.5 XL (IK Multimedia) where none of the guitar tab articulations did anything with the IK Multimedia virtual guitar, which tends strongly to suggest that the Notion 3 guitar has a bit of additional artificial intelligence happening . . .
Switching to the universe of Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics for a moment, common sense and a bit of information about the way user-defined custom samples are handled in SampleTank 2.5 XL suggest that it requires a set of 44 separate samples of individually picked notes for each specific type of note picking for each specific type of TONE, although this can be reduced to some extent by augmenting the TONE with AmpliTube 3 (IK Multimedia) . . .
This covers the 40 notes from open E on the low-pitch "
E" string to the G at the 15th fret of the high-pitch "
e" string, but one of the more expert SampleTank folks explained that it is necessary to include two empty or blank samples for notes below the lowest note and two empty or blank samples for notes above the highest note, which is done to prevent the SampleTank engine from emulating additional notes . . .
For example, a typical set of such sampled notes will look a bit like this for the real notes, where each WAVE file has one note at the indicated value for a specific duration and beat per minute tempo :
- Code: Select all
"Strat Herco Up Pick 8th 200bpm E2.wav"
"Strat Herco Up Pick 8th 200bpm F.wav"
"Strat Herco Up Pick 8th 200bpm F#2.wav"
.
.
.
"Strat Herco Flex50 Up Pick 8th 200bpm G5.wav"
I have not done the experiment to verify this, but it makes intuitive sense to me, because it is important to have the attack, sustain, and release of each note, which common sense strongly suggests is specific to the duration of the note, which in turn is specific to the tempo in beats per minute ("bpm"), and intuition also strongly suggests that this generally excludes allowing the SampleTank engine and Notion 3 to cause any aspects of the notes to be emulated, which at the extreme maps to having quite a few groups of sets, where the enumerating factors are note duration (whole note, half note, quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note, thirty-second note, and sixty-fourth note) and tempo, where for tempo one might limit it to 10 commonly used beat per minute tempos . . .
Doing the arithmetic, if you also include single dot values for the note durations, then there are 12 note durations, 10 commonly used beat per minute tempos, and 44 samples per specific Herco Flex50 single note picking technique, which maps to 5,280 individual note samples spread over 120 sets, where each set has 44 samples, 4 of which are blank or empty . . .
If there is a way to map a specific sample to a voice, which appears likely, then one can have four voices on a staff, although it is a bit entirely too busy, so forget about doing it that way, and instead focus on keeping everything simple, which maps to needing 12 staves for one specific type of Herco Flex50 note picking . . .
Keeping everything at least a tiny bit simple, if one allows only one type of Herco Flex50 upward picking and only one type of Herco Flex50 downward picking, then this maps to 12 staves for upward picked notes and 12 staves for downward picked notes, which covers the range of whole note to sixty-fourth note durations and corresponding single dot durations at a specific tempo in beats per minute, but this does not include string bends, vibrato, whammying, tapping, chiming, and so forth and so on . . .
And since every one of the sample sets is "heavy", this is at the upper limit of what Notion 3 can handle in one score for all practical purposes . . .
Each additional articulation maps to yet another 12 staves and 528 individual note samples, where each staff maps to a specific note duration . . .
So, if one limits the additional articulations to upward bends, downward bends, vibrato, and perhaps three types of whammying, then this adds 12 more sets of 12 staves and 528 individual note samples, where these 6 articulations are done with initial downward motions and separately with initial upward motions (which is the reason for 12 sets rather than just 6 sets), although it actually is a bit fewer, since it does not make a lot of sense to do whammying on a sixty-fourth note at 200 beats per minute, really . . .
Really! At this point, there are 168 staves, and a good bit of what one does on lead guitar with single notes is covered . . .
However, there also is the matter of chords, and chords are handled the same way for purposes of getting very precise sounds, where instead of a set of 44 individual note samples with the already explained enumerations for duration, tempo, and so forth, there is a set of perhaps 52 specific Barre chords with the same types of enumerations, where for example there is a set of 52 samples of Major chords running from open-position E Major all the way to the whatever chord makes sense at the 15th fret, which I suppose probably an open-position D Major chord but an octave higher, since the general idea is to have three subgroups of Major chords, where one subgroup has its root on the low-pitch "
E" string; another subgroup has its root on the low-pitch "
A" string; and yet another group has its root on the low-pitch "
D" string, which makes a bit of intuitive sense, for sure . . .
For sure! So, if you mostly are focused on
Rhythm and Blues,
Rock and Roll,
DISCO,
Pop, and
Heavy Metal, then for the most part one needs Major, Minor, Major 7th, Minor 7th, Ninth, and Diminished chords, which maps to 6 different types of chords, which come in downward strummed and upward strummed flavors, for a total of 12 sets, which can be expanded by two types of whammying to make it 24 sets, which maps to 24 sets at 12 durations at a specific beats per minute tempo, which if I am doing the arithmetic correctly maps to 288 additional staves . . .
With 168 staves for individual notes and 288 staves for individual chords, this maps to 456 staves for a lead guitar solo, which maps approximately to 20 Notion 3 scores at 20 to 25 staves per score . . .
SUMMARYI think it is important to observe (a) that IK Multimedia pretty much rules the amplifier, loudspeaker, and effects pedal emulation market with its AmpliTube 3 festival of products and (b) that it appears likely that none of the current IK Multimedia virtual guitars distinguish upward and downward strums, although there are IK Multimedia virtual guitar samples for different types of individual note picking techniques but more from a perspective of TONE than picking, per se . . .
As explained (
see above), there is a way to create your own very specific strumming and note picking guitar samples for with SampleTank, which in turn makes it available in Notion 3, but no matter how it is done with unaltered samples, it maps approximately to 22,000 individual samples over 456 sets, which is a bit beyond mind-boggling . . .
Mind-boggling! So, it mostly is a matter of determining whether there is a practical way to do it, which is a possibility . . .
One possibility is to do a series of experiments to determine whether there is a specific amplitude and frequency envelope for a generalized upward chord strum and a generalized downward guitar chord strum with additional respect to attack, sustain, and release, which probably is the case . . .
If there are two such envelopes, then this might be an easy way to emulate an upward strum and a downward strum as specific articulations, and it might be possible to do this simply "by ear" once one devised an algorithm for a filter, which probably is not such a difficult thing to do, since there is a good bit of information about the way various TONE controls for electric guitar work, which is where I would start, where the most obvious type of filters are LRC filters (Inductor, Resistor, Capacitor), where a downward strum will have a heavier bass emphasis while an upward strum will have a heavier treble emphasis . . .
[
NOTE: For reference, "L" is the abbreviation for "inductor" . . . ]
With this in mind, yet another possibility for a virtually trivial solution is to have two staves for guitar, where one staff is modified with one of the T-RackS 3 Deluxe (IK Multimedia) VST plug-ins for doing amplitude and frequency response filtering such that it has a more downward strummed TONE, while the other staff is modified in a similar but different way to have a more upward strummed TONE, which in the grand scheme of everything fits nicely with my strategy for "sparkling" an instrument, and in fact is one of the ways I solve the problem, although I never actually considered it from this particular perspective, since my primary focus is on TONE rather than technique . . .
This can be enhanced by using one of the T-RackS 3 Deluxe VST plug-ins for compressing and limiting, since it should be possible to modify the envelope this way, and there are other types of VST plug-ins that do something similar in one way or another, although setting the various parameters tends to be very specific to duration, so I am not certain how well this will work when chords or notes are sustained or played at different durations . . .
In other words, the only time I wander into controlling articulations at the individual note or chord level in the music notation universe is when it appears to be the easiest or perhaps only way to get a specific type of TONE . . .
For example, consider the guitar accents in the most recent version of the "basic rhythm section" for the new Surf Whammys song, "(Baby You Were) Only Dreaming", which now is mixed in Digital Performer 7, since the virtual instruments come from two separate but synchronized Notion 3 scores for a total of 31 "heavy" VSTi instruments, which is fabulous . . .
[
NOTE: One of the guitars is the Notion 3 guitar, and it is at top-center where it does vibrato and whammying, but all the other guitars and instruments are IK Multimedia virtual instruments, so everything is "heavy". The electric "Viking Strat" heard at far-left and far-right every once in a while is augmented with "Moog Jellysquids" playing the same chords, which adds a surreal Leslie rotating speaker effect. This is the first time I have used the Notion 3 guitar, and I really like the way it works. When the soundbite is recorded in Digital Performer 7, I have the option of running it through AmpliTube 3, which is quite intriguing. At the highest resolution or quality, the AmpliTube 3 VST plug-in is "vastly heavy" in terms of computer resources, so it works better on the Mac when I run it in Digital Performer 7, where I use it only long enough to get the TONE I want, at which time I bounce it to disk and switch to using a soundbite, since like Panorama 5 (Wave Arts), which is the other "vastly heavy" VST plug-in, it does not take many instances to bring Digital Performer 7 to an abrupt halt. If I do not use any VST effects plug-ins in Notion 3, then I usually can get 25 "heavy" VSTi instruments in one Notion 3 score, which is a very nice number of instruments for purposes of building a song in layers in the techniques made popular by Phil Spector ("Wall of Sound") and George Martin (Abbey Road Studios, Beatles), which is the way I do everything here in the sound isolation studio, except that I am working to move it to a higher level where the focus is on what I call the "Spherical Sonic Landscape"™, which is an elaborate multidimensional vector space that at least in theory has the potential to make it possible to have a bit of FUN in the mathematical fourth dimension (a personal favorite, along with Calibi-Yau manifolds). And for purposes of being precise, everything is done with music notation and virtual instruments in Notion 3, with the Notion 3 generated audio recorded and mixed in Digital Performer 7 via ReWire, where some of the more electronic Dubstep style sounds are enhanced with a bit of carefully timed cascading echo units . . . ]
"(Baby You Were) Only Dreaming" (The Surf Whammys) -- May 9, 2011 -- MP3 (9.2MB, 281-kbps [VBR], approximately 4 minutes and 23 seconds)Fabulous!
