Posted in: Recording by Maya Tong on March 24, 2009 | 1 Comment
Wanna make music like pros? My series of tutorials guide you to understand how our modern music is produced. Here, you’ll find prime concepts, main points and tips of MIDI synths and samplers.
Hello, I’m Maya. I am a multimedia artist who is very fond of music composition and recording, as well as a researcher in modern music production. My specialized areas in music include composition for MIDI orchestra, electronic wind instruments and surround audio mixing for Hollywood film score. To know more about me, please visit http://mayatong.blogspot.com
In my series of music/audio-related articles, I would like to guide you from beginner to veteran knowledge of modern music production, in terms of software and hardware. Other than just explaining each concept, I will try to include reasons, pros and cons, and tips. That should inspire some usages or ideas that even advanced people have never paid attention to. I will update my articles very often, so stay tuned!
In my last article (Part I – sequencer), we have talked about the purposes of music software are for (I) arranging and sequencing music, (II) generating instrumental sound, and (III) manipulating sound, and also talked about software used for sequencing and arranging music, in a way similar to our classic maestros writing on a staff. In this article, we will talk about a kind of music software generating instrumental sound, called softsynth and sampler, in modern music production. I hope this article can make your mind clear on a question like, ‘What software is used to generate musical sound?’
While classic composers conducted a live orchestra to turn a staff into beautiful melody, modern composers obtain melody by acquiring instrument sounds from MIDI equipment. In the old days, it was done by hardware synthesizers, usually called sound module or tone generator (contained built-in sound only), and sampler (designed for putting user own sounds in). Famous sound modules and samplers were from Roland, Yamaha, Korg and E-MU etc. Since a decade ago computers become more powerful, all these hardware modules or samplers turned into software. We now have two kinds of popular software that generates sound, they are (1) softsynth and (2) sampler.
figure 1: a typical hardware sound module (Roland XV-5080). This module also had a sampling function, which loaded user’s samples like an ordinary hardware sampler.
sk October 24th, 2009 at 6:51 am
Nice infos – very helpful overview