Projects

Brass Bell v1

As stated on the forums, this soundfont was made with a household object, which was a Brass cup and a Pecan picking tool. When struck, while holding the base of the cup with the edge of four fingers and while being held upside down, the sound coming out is smooth and clear. When making the muted notes for it, I simply wrapped two fingers along the bottom end of the cup itself, barely even touching the base of the whole thing and striking it with each velocity.

The microphone used to record the sounds was an ordinary Packard Bell Microphone that came bundled with the PC when it was released some years ago. With that and the know-how of removing hiss and noise using CoolEdit Pro v2.0, I was able to make a clear and hiss-free/noise-free soundfont of a Brass Cup being hit to produse a bell sound, or as Anttu put it, a smoother Glockenspiel.

The sounds were recorded through an integrated SoundBlaster PCI 128 VR soundcard on a 300Mhz PC with 128MB of RAM. The samples were then imported into Awave Studio v8.7, mapped on two patches (Open and Muted) and SFPacked onto a floppy and transfered over to my AMD Anthlon XP 1.1Ghz PC with 512MB of RAM and an integrated nVidia nForce Audio/SoundStorm soundcard. I resaved the soundfont in Awave Studio v9.2, re-SFPacked the file and uploaded for distribution.

As stated on the forums, Brass Bell v2 will have all velocities on one layer, but each velocity mapped to a major scale key, instead of the broad range scale on different layers. This will be the case for the Open and Muted notes. This method will let composers have the option of using mapped velocity over layered velocity, but layered velocity is much better due to seemless blending between velocities.

FindSounds Drumkit v3.2

To start off, let me tell you why this is called the FindSounds Drumkit, in case you have not visited the forums yet. The reason for that name was because most, but used to be all, of the samples used for the drumkit were downloaded from different sites searched by FindSounds.com. Many different sound samples can be found there, but only in WAV/AIF/AIFF/VOC format. At version 1, the entire drumkit was using samples found using FindSounds.com. It had the basic set (snares, toms, crashes, hats) in place, and most of the upper and lower regions rom that area were uncovered.

Version 2 brought most of the upper and lower regions, with some notes still missing. Version 3 brought all notes mapped with all need samples for basic GM, aside from the Drumroll (One shot) on key C#1 (C#3 for Awave Studio users). I figured that the clap was cheesy, but it will be implemented in a different patch (Kit 2). Version 3.1 brings corrected panning of hihats, toms, snares, crashes and rides, along with acoustic crash cymbals on C#2 and A2 (C#4 and A4 for AwStd* users). The newest verion 3.2 brings new toms and new snares. The toms are from the XV5080 Single Hits sample set. The snares are actually from the NI Drumkit, Yamaha 9000 from PettinHouse.com, but sampled down to mono waves instead of using stereo to save space. Besides, all other samples are mono, so best to keep it all uniform. Snares and Shaker are multi-velocity with the snares having blended velocities.

Version 4 will probably bring better snares (although already good), a few new patches with new snares, kicks, toms and a few other nick-nacks and new toms for the original patch as even editing it several times still makes the toms sound too close together in pitch. Also, version 3.1 brought a shortended Vibraslap sample as the instrument was lasting too long, yet I did not want it to just fade out. I would be un-natural. A different patch will carry the longer Vibraslap. Version 4 should also bring a trimmed Maracas sample as it seems too long as well, but will be moved to a different patch for custom drum tracks needing a long Maracas sample.

For now, this is all I have on information about the soundfonts hosted here. Come back soon to see what else gets added! Laterz~

djDarkX