If you haven’t noticed, we have a little debate going on regarding last week’s September 15 post Feed the Hungry – Heal the Thought. A number of astute comments poured in reflecting several musician’s thoughts and frustrations with the art of sampling.

It’s clearly a controversial world and I live smack in the middle of it seeing both sides with equal respect. However, tonight, I’d like to clear up several misconceptions about the sample process.

First of all, sampling is the act of recording the actual sound of the real instrument and then re-using those notes to build orchestral parts. Many people confuse this with synthesis.  [For a much more detailed study of this, please see: On Sampling – Part 1-3 in this very blog]

I have orchestrated for ‘real’ orchestras in my career and also for the virtual ‘sampled’ kind as well and though there are virtues to each, I believe the public generally misunderstands the latter. These too are ‘real’ orchestras. They are just as ‘live’ as a ‘real’ orchestra because they too are digital recordings of orchestras playing music.

Let’s consider, for this article’s purposes, a string section. The truth is, if the programmer knows his stuff, I don’t believe the listener will know the difference between a ‘real’ orchestra and a sampled one. If the programmer knows his stuff and also if the programmer chooses to try to emulate the ‘real’ orchestra.

The overreaching arc of tonight’s discussion is not so much the samples, but the understanding of the programmer. In the case where one is trying to emulate the real orchestra, the way the samples are played is paramount. As usual, without a gifted musician behind the playing, the music will have little worth.

In programming strings one has to know his library backwards and forwards and understand the way strings are played and then play his samples with passion and commitment. Different bowings, in a string section, will elicit multifarious emotional responses in the music. For instance sordino bowing (a light touch or light laying on of the bow to the strings) will produce an unearthly gossamer kind of sound whereas tremolo bowing will produce an excited or nervous quality.

When working with the samples the sounds must be shaped and manipulated to perfectly emulate the sound of how the players would play the particular passage. Many programmers do not take the real orchestra into deep enough consideration and often miss the subtle nuances of upstrokes and down strokes, giving breath, dynamics, using multi-samples in expressive passages to emulate the way a great string section would play.

Sometimes I hear sampled horn work on CDs where the programmer does not allow the trumpet player to breathe. This immediately takes away the reality of the moment. Sometimes the programmer will not match the various vibratos of the orchestra to one another. Simply put, some programmers ‘hear’ better than others.

I like to tell the story of a particular session at my studio. I was not engineering the session nor particularly involved, but in the middle of the session the engineer asked me to come in and pull a good acoustic nylon string guitar from my library of virtual instruments. I set one up, played a few arpeggios and the client/player said, “Oh, that sounds great! Thanks.”

I then left the room, but within moments the engineer came and spoke to me again and said that the computer had dropped its program. Once again I went into the session and set up the sound to the client’s delight.

The engineer was immediately in my face again moments later complaining of the same problem. I went back into the session and the sound was still up in the keyboard. I played a few more arpeggios to show him that everything was working and he said, “Well, it doesn’t sound like that when I play it!”

I asked him then to play the guitar part on the keyboard and he sat down and played the piano. What I mean is that he played the keyboard like he was playing a piano part instead of a guitar part. A guitar has six strings. When you strum, you can’t hit all the strings at the same time like you can the chord on the piano keys. You must arpeggiate from low strings to high strings on a down stroke and vice versa on an upstroke.

Also the strings are a fifth and a fourth away from each other and you have to take that and many more elements of the particular instrument into consideration. As I gave the client a quick lesson in programming, I could see the light dawn in his eyes. His parts became immediately better as he thought more like a guitar player.

So when I’m programming, if I really want my work to sound like a live orchestra was actually in the studio that day, I will take hours and sometimes days to work over and perfect a particularly exposed passage to give it just the nuance that the live great players will bring to the music. It can be done, but you have to do it. It ain’t magic.

Also the bottom line, for me, is this. As a composer, I work from a palette of sound, not instruments. The art of the orchestrator is the art of combining the noises that an instrument can make to create a unified whole. The sound is everything.

And when you’re dealing with sound, I think everything is fair game. I once used two heavy bottom glasses whose rattling bottoms gave me a great percussive sound. I once played the change in my pocket slapping the outside of my jeans rhythmically to create just the right sound in a patter song. Essentially I mic’d my pants.

I mix the sounds of nature with my music all the time – sounds of rain, wind, thunder, traffic, people at a cocktail party, gunshots, breaking glass. For the composer, all sound is fair game, so who’s to say that the orchestra even has to sound real? What if the composer doesn’t care? What if the composer doesn’t want the trumpet player to breathe? What if he wants the 16 bars to be played with no breath? Sometimes in sessions with live players or singers I’ll ask for staggered breathing (i.e., everyone catches their breaths at staggered moments to make the sound go beyond the human possibility).

I say it’s a new world. We have these wonderful new advances in sound to work with. They cannot be ignored. For thousands of years the western composer had 50 to a hundred different instruments to work with. His job was to mix them and use them in multifarious ways.

Now the world of sound has had a tremendous breakthrough in the area of what’s available. With the recent developments in synthesis, we have now millions of sounds to work with. If you can imagine it, you can have it or you can build it.

If you are either patient enough to look or knowledgeable enough to program, you can create the nuances of your mind’s imagination. It’s an incredible time to be alive and creating. The tools are simply staggering.

I say, let’s use ‘em.

For more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link,
please visit Watchfire Music.