About The Demos
The demos were designed to serve 2 purposes. The first was to provide a demonstration of the SampleSmith G1 sound font, and the second was that they be used as a vehicle for demonstrating the sort of midi editing required to bring out the best of any soundfont. In the tutorials, I'm providing the original and final midi tracks of both demos and describe the editing process that went into their production.
The Fingerpicking Demo
The finger picking demo, an original tune of mine called Mixed Bag, was recorded as an audio file and as a midi file at the same time. The audio channel was only intended as a reference track, and was recorded in my too-noisy control room with TrueTone pick-up installed in the guitar. The midi track was recorded with a Roland GK2a midi pickup temporarily installed on my Northwood OM-60 acoustic guitar. The GK2a output was plugged into a Roland GR-33, and from there, into a Midisport 2X4 midi interface and recorded into Cubase SX2. Of course the audio track is not heard in the demo. That's straight midi.
This demo was recorded with no quantization, and as such can be used as an example of most of the problems one might encounter with this kind of setup. There are false and missing midi notes, some playing mistakes, and the grid is useful only as a visual reference, except as described in copying and pasting.
Some may take issue with this method, and I confess that in the demo there
are a few persistent rhythmic clumsiness's left over. The at-tempo part of
the tune was played in with the metronome, but the feel of the piece leads
the time, and thus the basic time relates to the grid but very few notes
actually fall on it. I suppose I could have shifted the entire file to line
up to the grid more closely, but at that point one may as well quantize,
or try 'iterative quantization' or the equivalent in whatever software you're
using. I'll leave those experiments to you.
The Strum Demo
This demo attempts to demonstrate the sorts of problems faced by a keyboardist who builds a quantized guitar part, and then needs to get some guitar 'feel' into it. Actually it was recorded in the same manner as the finger picking demo (since I'm useless at keyboards) but was quantized, thrown onto one midi channel, and 'sanititized' of the sorts of false notes one might expect from a midi guitar recording before I started the editing.
In the editing, we'll separate the downstrokes from the upstrokes of the pick, and separate the strings all to different channels and that will give us a lot more control. We'll consider the delay from string to string when strumming and look at ways to filter say 2nd string notes on an upstroke to be able to change their velocity or timing. Until the tutorial on this is availble, you might want to check out Some Basic Guitar Picking Principles for the Keyboardist on the Articles Page.
For the Uprite Bass track I used UpriteBass.sf2 which I found at www.sf2midi.com ,
uploaded by Jeuzel.