Let me explain.
As part of the ongoing group project, we've decided to record all the instruments ourselves, instead of relying on lackluster system sound . For example, Scratch does have the capacity to output a musical tone. But, there are a few less than ideal qualities about how the user choses the note and how it is represented. First, the program does not represent notes in a musical manner. Instead, the tones are simply numbered. For example, the user can create a command do play note "x" like this...
A much more intuitive method would be to have the notes and even chords labeled with their actual musical names, like this...
The second issue is with the scratch sound bank itself, while not awful it does sound rather artificial and not so pleasing to the ears. So, to solve these two issues we are sampling a variety of instruments, note-by-note and compiling our own higher quality sound bank for use with the MaKey MaKey Chord Board. The first step was to decide upon which instruments to make the recordings. We decided to sample the very universal piano, the human voice, the electric and acoustic guitar and the marimba, a pitched percussion instrument. These musical instruments are both common and diverse in timbre, which brings up another advantage to the sampling process. It was theorized by both Graham and Savannah that there was something to be said for recognizing pitches in general versus hearing them on your preferred instrument. I agree with this concept, it is certainly more natural for me to hear intervals and chords played on the guitar than the piano. This is because the guitar is my instrument of study. Therefore, the concept should also be applicable to a pianist, a brass player, a singer and a percussionist. So, that is why we chose the aforementioned instruments to sample.
This is where the fun began for me, the actual recording of the instruments. For sake of maximizing the tonal combinations possible for the end product, we recorded a full three octave set of chromatic notes. That is, from middle C ascending chromatically for three octaves, giving enough room to create first and second inversions in most major and minor keys. First came the piano, which proved a bit of a challenge when situated in a concert hall with a lot of natural reverb and very loud hammer action. The solution proved to be simply placing the microphone under the piano instead of inside the resonating chamber.The resulting sound was a bit duller, but infinitely more pleasing than the inside sound. Have a listen! Example: C Major Triad
Once the samples were recorded, it was time to cut them up (now the title makes more sense...) to equal lengths and align them so that the starting position of each note became as close to even as possible from track to track.
I used Logic Express which is my DAW of choice, to make this all happen.
Step 1: Record the audio.
Step 2: Slice it all up, note-by-note.
Step 3: Rearrange the Clips onto separate tracks. This was done so that chords could be created by combining tracks instead of having to record every possible chord, which would take a whole lot of time.
Step 4: This step was really just organization so that I wouldn't get myself confused. I color coded the notes in the manor of a piano roll. This facilitated quicker creation of chords since the notes were a lot easier to visualize.
The Final step for organization was to line up the start points of each note to same postion, or at least as close as Logic Express would permit. The start times were corrected to within a few samples of each other, at which point it is very difficult for us to hear a difference in the starting position of each note. That is the bulk of the process! It is a bit slow and repetitive but really fulling in the end since we are presented with a really large spectrum of chordal and intervalic possibilities at our disposal for the MaKey MaKey Chord Board!
Tonight's mission for me is recording acoustic and electric guitar samples.
Have a nice evening.
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