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Virtual instrument: Japanese Knotweed
During a hands-on short live talk, I created this instrument. I cut the short trunks of the Japanese Knotweed last year during a walk with my son. Japanese Knotweed DecentSampler instrument You will need to download the free DecentSampler to run it.
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Virtual instrument: Hitting a bridge railing
Hitting the heavy metal railing of a small bridge with the palm of my hand (in gloves) makes an interesting, vibrating and sustained sound. Recorded in stereo with a Zoom H4N Pro, I boosted the frequencies of the root note (which is somewhere between C2 and C#2) and its overtones (inspired by Venus Theory) and shifted the pitch down to C2. As I can’t tune the railing, there is only one sample.
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Virtual instrument: Vio(lin)a, a 3/4 violin restringed with viola strings
This weekend I came across a beautiful 3/4 violin (13"), re-stringed with viola strings by Nicola Schöllhorn. I was impressed by its sound. I am easy to impress, I guess. I am neither a violin nor viola player and the only instruments I touched until now were cheap lent school instruments. But compared to those the sound is overwhelming, so much louder, so much clarity. This is a “recording” playing the MIDI from this easy duet arrangement of Scarborough Fair.
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Lieder Zum Mitsingen und ein Blues
Hier das PDF zum Ausdrucken mit den Texten, Bildern und Noten: Teil 4: Lieder zum Mitsingen und ein Blues Lieder zum Mitsingen Viele Ukulelen-Kurse fangen mit Kinderliedern an, “Bruder Jakob” und so weiter. Diese sind natürlich sehr einfach und haben den großen Vorteil, dass man mitsingen kann (ohne sich eine Melodie mit Text ausdenken zu müssen). Aber besonders spannend klingen sie natürlich nicht (finde ich zumindest). Es gibt aber ein paar Ausnahmen, und das sind “Die Affen rasen durch den Wald” und der “Cowboy Jim”.
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Jingle Bells auf der Ukulele, ganz einfach
Wie versprochen, anbei eine Aufnahme der einfachen Version von Jingle-Bells, unser erstes Stück mit dem G-Dur-Akkord. Man kann, denke ich, sowohl die Begleitung als auch die Stimme gut genug heraushören, so dass ihr nicht noch einmal die einzelnen Aufnahmen braucht. Anbei auch die Noten. Denkt daran: Es sind zwei Zeilen, in jeder Zeile steht das gleiche, nur anders geschrieben. in der oberen Zeile sind die echten Noten (die ihr nicht lesen müsst – aber es kann euch helfen, wenn ihr schon Noten lesen könnt), in der unteren sind die sogenannten “Tabs” (Tabulatur): vier Linien, die die vier Saiten der Ukulele darstellen.
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Ukulelen-AG 2021: Erstes Übungsstück, langsamer
Ich habe euch das erste Übungsstück noch einmal aufgenommen. Diesmal langsamer, so dass ihr besser mitspielen könnt.
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Virtual instrument: Metallophone
Metallophone Work in progress, just a preview version of Kontakt and Decent Sampler format to download, SFZ still in development. Download as DecentSampler instrument (See DecentSampler) Download as Kontakt 6 instrument (Full Kontakt version required) This is the MIDI playback of the version of Scarborough Fair, originally written for harp, available on Musescore.
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Virtual instrument: Beer Bottle Flute
In the shared flat I lived in during my math studies years ago, one day I build a “flute” with a collection water and beer bottles, filled with more or less water forming a scale over almost two octaves. I wasn’t really able to play it because I was hyperventilating after only a few seconds. Now I created a virtual instrument with just one sample from a beer bottle. I had planned to record more notes, but it sounds good already, just with this one.
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Lever harp soundfont, first version
A first try: sampling a lever harp I started to play around lately with sampling and creating virtual instruments, recorded some notes on the harp with my H4N Pro, postprocessed them in Cubase, and created a sound font in sf2 format, mainly using Polyphone. I am quite sure that I should have postprocessed the samples much more (level, tune, noise reduction, …), but for the first try, this does not sound too bad.
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Software to start creating virtual instruments
A few weeks ago I started to dive into creation of “digital” instruments to use them in any DAW (Cubase, in my case), or even as playback sound font for MuseScore, for example. I got quite disappointed. I did not find what I was searching for. There is Steinberg’s HALion (expensive, really complex) and Native Instruments' Kontakt (even more expensive), and EXS24 for Logic Pro But with neither of them it is possible to create or export instruments in a format which can be distributed for free so that it can be used by others without a Cubase, Logic or Kontakt license.
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