Week 3: More-o-DeMorrow
This week I recorded the one-of-a-kind 5.3(!) octave marimba made by DeMorrow, and began importing into kontakt!
As I discussed in my post from week 1, the DeMorrow is a beautiful instrument that is unfortunately stuck in a practice room that could not be worse for recording! Hard dry wall, stiff resonant drums all over, a loud airstream flowing above, all of these make that room a nightmare to record in. But, seeing as I was determined to sample this instrument I had to find a way to treat the room just enough to make it a suitable recording environment. Being inspired by the cold weather (and some acoustical knowledge of course) I knew that the easiest solution was to fill the room with as many blankets as I could find! So I gathered sheets of all shapes and sizes and scoured the percussion studio for various stands and tripods to hang them on. The end result was a DIY marimba-fort recording booth.
To maintain a sleek workflow while recording, I decided to for-go a second mic as I did not find having a coincident mic terribly useful while editing the vibraphone samples. I chose to do a slightly different variation of sample numbers for the marimba as opposed to what I recorded for the vibraphone. Because the marimba is a naturally decaying instrument with no controlled sustain, having a sufficient number of round robins will greatly increase the quality of the MIDI. In general, transient based instruments favor having more round robins. This is because the burst of extra-harmonic vibrations that occur at transients are what inform the ear of the nuisances of the sound. In fact, when the transients are clipped off of recordings of various different instruments, a piano and flute for example, the sustains sound largely similar. Within a single instrument, or even a single marimba bar, hearing the same transient over and over becomes very noticeable. Because the harmonics contained within the transients are shaping what the listener hears, having a number of ever so slightly varied samples for a transient-based instrument makes it sound much more natural and humanized.
Though different mallets greatly affect the sound I only recorded with one set of mallets. The Robert Van Sice signature series are made of yarn wrapped around a rubber core, attached to a maple wood shaft. The way the yarn is wrapped decreases the sound of the yarn on the bar which is ideal for capturing the sound of the bars. The rubber core brings out the upper-harmonics of the bars at higher dynamics without sounding “slappy” at softer levels. Additionally, with a fully graduated set I was able to record separate ranges of the marimba with separate mallets. For A1-A3 I used the M112, Bb3-B4 M113, C5-B6 M114, and C6-C7 the M115.
To make up for using only a single series of mallets, I recorded the marimba at 3 dynamics, piano, mezzo-forte, and forte. These three velocity layers, along with 5 round robins, and 63 bars means I recorded 945 individual marimba samples.
Once they were recorded I began the process of editing them in Reaper and importing them into Kontakt. I learned much more about the functionality of implementing dynamics in Kontakt. By creating separate groups for each dynamic level I can assign each group’s velocity range discreetly. For the first trial of this I implemented the piano samples from 1-65, mezzo-forte from 50-110, and forte from 95-127. As you may have seen these values overlap! Kontakt has the ability to apply crossfades between these velocity layers within an instrument. By overlapping the P/MF and MF/F I created a more gradual shades of dynamics within the instrument as opposed to immediate swaps. This makes for a much more musical instrument as there is much more nuisance to dynamics than discontinuous levels.
After placing the samples and polishing the dynamics I programmed the beginning for a marimba standard, Virginia Tate by Paul Smadbeck to be played by it!
