Here’s some great news to anyone who uses virtual instruments: Now you can try many different instruments from your own computer, almost instantly. No need to download huge sound banks or demos. All you need is a decent internet connection and a sound interface. A MIDI keyboard connected to your computer would be great, but is not essential.

This is made possible by Try-Sound.com, “the world’s first online Test Station for virtual instruments and plug-ins”. Basically, you set up a free account at the website, and then set up a “session”, a 25-minute slot during which you can spend some quality time with the virtual instruments. You are then given a link to download a small exe file created just for that session. At the time of your session, run that exe (double click on it) and you’ll have a palette of virtual instruments waiting right there on your desktop to play with.

The idea is very simple and effective: That exe file is just the user interface of the instrument. All the hefty content (the huge sound banks and samples) remain on the Try-Sound servers. When you trigger a note on your computer (through a MIDI keyboard, or by using the on-screen virtual keyboard), that note is sent as a MIDI message to the servers, which process it and send you back the audio.

The latency? You ask. Well it’s there, but not so much as to ruin the party. It’s not ”playable” in the practical sense, but good enough for a test drive. I did not measure it, but with my 2048 kbps connection my totally non-scientific guess was that the latency was somewhere around 25-30 ms.

The sound quality is pretty good, and they add a constant loop of bird tweets in the background so that people don’t capitalize on the free stuff.

The list of instruments and plug-ins currently available for a test drive can be found here and supposedly the list is continuously expanding. I, for one, certainly hope so, and I can’t think of a better way to get a feel for these instruments before investing in them. As much as I love listening to the demo mp3’s posted on the product websites, they tend to be kind of overblown and they don’t really give me much of an idea about how the instrument would behave in person. This new technology promises to deliver just that.

If you use orchestral sample libraries in your music and wish you could make them sound more realistic, here are some tested-and-proven methods you can try in your next production.

 1. An orchestra is an orchestra. You don’t have to be a drummer to use drum samples realistically, but a solid knowledge of basic drumming techniques will certainly help. The same is true for orchestration. The more you learn about orchestration techniques, the better your orchestrations will become. Although this may seem intimidating, you’ll find that learning even the most basic orchestrating techniques will improve your orchestrations at an exponential rate. There are several on-line resources that could get you started, and most of them are free. Think of this as a long-term investment in the quality of your music.

 2. Articulate. A violin player can play a note in hundreds of different ways, and each of these will trigger a different emotion. The same is true for all the other instruments in an orchestra. Most orchestral sample libraries feature a good collection of these articulations and offer you different ways of including them in your virtual performances. Good use of articulations will take a dull, robotic performance and make it sound much more realistic.

 3. Nothing fancy. A human performer can push the limits of a real instrument, but it is not generally a good idea to push the limits of sampled instrument sounds, unless you’re doing it for a special effect. Stay within the normal ranges of instruments and don’t try to make a virtuoso out of your sequencer by employing exotic playing techniques.

 4. The attack and the machine gun. One of the most common tell-tale signs that give away your orchestra’s sampled nature is the so-called machine-gun effect: If your music has short, repeated notes played by a certain instrument, the listener’s ear will quickly recognize that it’s being served the same sample over and over again. Another common sign is the attack of a note being heard although you actually want a passage to be played legato. Most sample collections offer tools to cope with these and other problems, with varying degrees of success. Familiarize yourself with these tools and use them whenever they are needed.

 5. Mix’n match. The producers of orchestral sample libraries tell you not to do this, for understandable reasons, but I’ve found that mixing samples from different collections can yield excellent results. You need to be careful about balancing the differences in miking, color, warmth and general attitude, but that should not stop you from using that beautiful oboe sample just because it’s in your “other” sample collection.

And why limit yourself to sample collections? Used cleverly, a patch on your aging hardware synthesizer can give you that fullness you’ve been looking for in your string section. I have an old Roland synth with an Orchestral Expansion Card, and the pizzicato double basses on that thing are my first choice whenever I need a little more punch than what my libraries can offer.

 6. Get help from other humans. Whenever possible, enlist the help of real musicians by recording them and mixing them with your samples. A human performance will add articulation, randomness and other details that could break the all-too-homogeneous texture of an entirely sampled performance. Record multiple takes and mix them all to create an even more realistic sounding ensemble.

 7. Divide and conquer. Most orchestral sample libraries include samples of instrument groups (or ensembles): first violins, four trumpets, the cello section, etc. While these are great for arranging a quick sketch for a composition, they are generally not suitable for “broadcast quality” production. They lack the level of detail and variation you’d find in a real ensemble. If you have the time, patience and inclination, instead of using a sample of 8 violins, use 8 different solo violin samples triggered from 8 different MIDI channels with slight differences in performance. Or even better, as an extension of Tip # 6, if you can get your hands on a real violin player, record 4 takes of his/her performance and mix that with 4 sampled solo violins. It is a lot of work, but you will be rewarded with a full sounding performance, rich in detail and variation.

(If you don’t have the time to do this and decide to go with section samples, at least keep their performances monophonic- don’t give them more than one note to play at any given moment. If you’re using a sample of 8 violins and if you try to have that sample play 2 simultaneous notes, it will not sound like 16 violins, it will sound funny. If you want 8 violins to play divisi, see Tips # 6 & 7. If you don’t know what divisi is, see Tip # 1.)

 8. Mix with a reference. When you’re mixing your orchestral production, find a recording of a similar work played by a real orchestra of a similar size. Try to make your mix sound as close to that recording as possible. This will help you sort out any psycho-acoustic problems that would otherwise go unnoticed (blaring instruments, use of reverb, panning, perception of depth, etc.).

 9. Noise can be good. Try adding a dash of real concert hall noise (audience coughing, chairs squekaing, a bow hitting a note stand, whatever). You need to take extra care that the noise and your music have the same ambience, that they are in the same perceived space. If done correctly, this convinces the unsuspecting listener beyond doubt that the performance is real.

 10. Reverb. A concert hall treats all instruments of an orchestra together in the same acoustic environment, and your mix should reflect that. Keep all your instrument samples and audio channels dry, and add reverb to them through a single reverb unit or plugin fed through a send/return configuration. This way, reverb from all your instruments will blend together as in a real concert hall, and you can adjust the level of reverb applied to each instrument by using the send or return level on that instrument’s channel. In a concert hall, although every instrument is in the same acoustic space, some will have a higher level of perceived reverb than others. For guidance on how to set the reverb levels right, refer to Tip # 8.

After reading in the news about your opinion on the United States of America v. Dove case, I just felt I had to react.

Imagine for a moment that I broke into a jewellery store, disabled the security cameras, switched off the alarms, broke the security glasses, maybe took a couple of jewels and then fled. Since I left the store defenseless, there was plundering; several passersby (who had no intention to purchase jewellery when they got up that morning) entered the shop and looted, say, 762 items that were in the store’s inventory.

Now let’s imagine, again, that I was caught, found guilty, and the store held me and the looters responsible for the 762 missing items and demanded restitution, and the Judge gave the following opinion:

Those who loot jewelry from unprotected stores would not necessarily purchase those jewels at the full purchase price.

This, to me, seems to miss the whole point of any type of stealing.

I know that despite the decade-old debate on this topic, many people who download music illegally do not realize that they are “stealing” another person’s intellectual property. The danger increases when the justice system begins to slight the impact of this behavior, commonly euphemized as sharing. The fact that music is not tangible seems to make stealing it easier on the conscience, but this is arbitrary.

The looters in my example have stolen, even if they would not purchase those jewels at the full price, even if they never wore those jewels or gave them to someone else. Again in the above example, I am responsible for all this because I prepared the conditions for looting. All 762 items and not one less. I can not see why illegal downloads should merit a different treatment.

Respectfully,

Doruk Somunkiran

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The Simpsons collage

Although the character in the foreground is the same in every panel, the backgrounds change, evoking different stories in our minds.

We can do the same thing in music through a process called reharmonization. We leave our melody intact (like the dude in the above picture) and change the chords that are played behind it. This will let us hear the melody within a new context and give the song an entirely different mood. A bright melody can become darker, a down-to-earth song can become mysterious. It all depends on your imagination and intent.

Let’s take a simple melody and work with it to see how we can change its mood through reharm:

Figure 1: The melody

If you’ve never tried to put chords behind a melody before, now may be a good time to give a shot at it. Download this melody (download links are at the end of this post), loop it in your favorite audio software, and try to come up with some chords for it. It’s a flexible melody that will work with many different chord combinations, so it shouldn’t take too long. I’ll make some coffee and wait here while you give it a shot.

O.K., if this were to become a pop or rock song, the chords we would use behind this melody would be somewhere along these lines:

Figure 2: Melody with triads

Now let’s see why this works: First, the chords I used are all triads. Triads are three-note chords that generally sound full, simple and to the point. The three notes that make up a triad are:

• The root (which gives the chord its name),
• The third (which gives the chord its character, i.e. major/minor)
• The fifth (which gives the chord its body or fullness).

The chords I used in the above example work because I picked chords that contain the notes in our melody. For example, the chord in the first measure, G Major, is made up of these notes: G, B and D. It works in this measure because, for the most part, the melody uses the note B, which is the 3rd of G Major. In the second measure, the melody settles on the note D, and guess which chord we have in the background? D minor! So the note in the melody is the root of the chord in the harmony. If you examine Figure 2 you’ll find that chords are chosen by consistently following this simple logic (the relationship of a note to the chord playing behind it is indicated below each note).

By using triads and making sure that the chords agree with the notes in the melody, we achieved a very full, down-to-earth sound, which would fit perfectly within a rock or pop setting. This is because of the fact that the agreement between the melody and harmony results in a very consonant combination, which can be very powerful.

But what if we wanted to give this melody a mysterious, unsettling mood? What if we wanted to make it sound a little dissonant? A little… Ok I’ll say it… jazzy?

There is a common misconception among beginner students of harmony that, since jazz arrangements rely heavily on 7th chords and tensions, we can spice up the harmonic structure of a song simply by adding 7’s and tensions to the existing chords. If we wanted to “jazzify” the chords in figure 2 by adding 7’s and 9’s to them, we would find that they sound pretty lame. That’s because 7th chords do not really play well if their root note is prominently featured in the melody. They sound much better when the melody dances on their weaker elements, like the 3rd, the 7th, or even the tensions.

So for the jazzy version we will need to come up with chords with different roots and probably different qualities. Here is one possibility:

Figure 3: Melody with seventh chords

Now let’s see why this one works: As before, the relationship of each note to the chord playing behind it is indicated below the staff. We start with a CMaj7 chord, which is made up of the notes C, E, G, B. The B in the melody is the 7th of that chord; which puts the melody in a dreamy setting right from the start. You’ll see after examining Figure 3 that for the rest of the melody, significant notes are either 3rd or 7th of whatever chord is played at a given moment.

What I particularly like about this chord progression is the stepwise root motion, meaning that the roots of the chords go down a half step (C, B, Bb, A). This sounds very smooth and presents interesting opportunities for voice leading (we’ll talk about this some other time). If we were playing with an actual bass player this would also give him/her a chance to try out some very interesting musical ideas.

You may have noticed that the B note in measure 3 sounds funny; that’s because it clashes with the Bb in the root of the chord. When two notes at an interval of a minor second are played simultaneously they clash or create dissonance, which I talked about in this post. Dissonance can be a good thing, depending on what we want. Here in this example it sounds weird and out of place, but I left it there because that B is just a passing note and resolves before it gets too disturbing. If we are allowed to change the melody during this reharm process, we could change that B to Bb and it would fit like a glove.

Let’s finish with an example that really takes our melody beyond a meat-and-potatoes harmonic perspective:

This is the territory of non-functional harmony, and I’ve used quartal voicing for the chords. This is somewhat beyond the scope of this post, so for the moment let’s just focus on how different our melody sounds from the first example, although in reality it’s exactly the same melody.

I hope this has inspired you to try out different ideas when working on your melodies. If you’ve read this far, please share your comments or questions. Thanks for joining!

Questions for thought:

• We play three notes to play a power chord on the guitar, so, does that mean that a power chord is some kind of a triad?
• In Figure 2, what key is our melody in? How about in Figure 3?

Download links to above sound examples:

Only the melody
Melody with triads
Melody with seventh chords
Melody with non-functional harmony

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Simply, dissonance is two or more notes that sound wrong when played together. Play any two adjacent keys on a piano simultaneously and you’ll know what I mean. Here is an example with strings:

Example 1: Dissonance (the spice)[See post to hear audio]

But since music is all about context, the way we present this to our audience makes all the difference in the world. I can dress up the previous dissonant notes so they’ll sound… beautiful. Or I can dress them up to sound scary. It all depends on how I use this spice in my recipe. Listen to this example, which starts with the same dissonance in example 1, and then I fade in some other notes:

Example 2: Music with dissonance (complete recipe)[See post to hear audio]

If I took out the dissonant notes and kept all the “correct” sounding notes, this is what it would sound like:

Example 3: Music without dissonance (recipe without spice)[See post to hear audio]

See how dissonance adds an edge? It gives our sound a bite that just isn’t there in example 3.

By the way, if you like the recipe without spice better than with spice, don’t worry. Mainstream music contains very little dissonance (just like fast-food contains very little spice). The ears of a large percent of the world’s population are not accustomed, and may find it annoying.

The only place where a composer can get away with including lots of dissonance in his/her music and still reach millions of ears (and hearts) worldwide is in film music. Since, like I said, music is all about context, dissonant music will be readily accepted by audiences if it accompanies, say, a battle scene.

It may be interesting to note, though, that in the evolution of things, human taste in general is shifting towards dissonance. If a person from the 18th century had a chance to listen to some mainstream music of today, his reaction would be like yours when you listened to example 1. Our nutritious choices may be leaning towards the healthy side, but when it comes to music, we like to spice things up. Makes you wonder what music will sound like in 200 years, doesn’t it?

To continue the analogy, what concerned me about my student’s decision to quit his day job and pursue a career in music (see If music be the food of love… (Part I)) was that he was madly in love and he was talking about marriage.

Being madly in love is a fascinating and curious state; we tend to idolize the objects of our desire, and ignore any signs that tell us they are not really who we think they are (“love is blind”, as they say).

Stencil Music Man by soul122

Then one of two things happen: a) this remains an unreturned love and we never really get to know the person; the mystery remains and we remain madly in love for a long, long time; or b) a relationship begins and we get to know the person. The natural end result of this process is for us to realize that the object of our desire is not really the idol we dreamt them to be. If we’re lucky, though, we might find that there’s still a lot to like about this person, maybe in ways we had not even imagined. The “madly in love” state will fade, but the relationship may bloom and prosper.

Playing music and being a musician are two quite different things; being passionate about one does not necessarily mean, or guarantee, that you will be passionate about the other. Becoming a musician is like getting married to music. You have to be sure that when love fades, you have something that still ties you to that commitment; something that makes you happy. Something that makes you grow. Then you can have your cake and eat it, too.

My student is still a bit disappointed. I guess that bit of disappointment today is better than a great frustration a few years down the line. And who knows maybe, after a little more soul-searching, he will find that music is his soul-mate; then no one, not even the most discouraging teacher, will ever be able to break his spirit again. Because there will be no other way.

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“Why?” I asked.

He was surprised. He expected me to be the ever-supporting teacher that I normally am. He expected me to pat his back and tell him that he had made the right decision; that, with his level of talent, he was sure to become a success, and I’d be there to support him every step of the way. But I didn’t.

“Why do you want to become a musician?”

Surprised as he was, he was not the kind of person to avoid a challenge. He knew this was one of my tests, sort of like an oral exam; an interview that would determine if he was ready to move on to the next level. So he charged forward with what seemed to be at the core of his decision:

“Because I love music, and that’s what I want to do.”

Wrong answer for this test. Well, at least, not the right answer for this test. I decided to grill him a bit more to see if he’d tell me what I expected to hear:

“You know, I love cooking, but I’ve never thought about becoming a chef. I love fishing (I hate it, actually, but I was just trying to make a point), but I’ve never thought about becoming a fisherman. I love sex, but I’ve never thought about-”

“I get it” he said, apparently the grilling worked; his face was turning red. “I get it. But don’t you understand that I’m talking about something really big here? This is much bigger for me than cooking can ever be for you. I’m talking about taking the plunge. For music. I’m talking about making that big leap, like you made, like, ten years ago. You, of all people, should understand how I feel about this.”

Image credit: Street Art

“How do you feel?” I asked. He shook his head and looked away for a couple of seconds.

“I feel thrilled… nervous… happy… like I’m being born again.”

“Are you scared?”

“No. Even if things don’t go as I expected, I can always go back to my old career.”

This last answer really killed my last hope and nailed the coffin.

“I don’t think you’re ready.” I said, surprised at how calm my voice was.

“What are you talking about? Don’t you always tell me how good I am? How good I’ve become? Don’t you always encourage me and tell me that my songs are major league stuff? I am ready!”

“I am not questioning your talent.”

“So what are you questioning? My ability to survive in the music business? My star power? My business savvy? What?”

“I am not questioning these either. You’ve been working as a freelance web designer, and a succesful one. This proves to me you know a thing or two about making it in any business.”

“Then what is it?”

“I just don’t think you’ll be happy if you choose to become a musician.”

“Why?”

The circle was completed. My own weapon, this hardest question to answer, was now directed at me. What I could not tell him was that, when I asked him why he wanted to become a musician, I expected him to say “because there’s no other way”. Or something to that effect. I simply could not tell this to him, because that was my own answer ten years ago. And it is nasty to expect people to act like me.

What I did tell him was along these lines:

If music be the food of love… (Part 2)

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