How do you make a sample playable like a preset?

For anything relating to music-making on Windows computers, with lots of FAQs. Moderated by Martin Walker.

Moderator: Moderators

Locked

How do you make a sample playable like a preset?

Post by ulrichburke »

Dear Anyone.

I love writing music, am NOT good at VSTs like samplers, so I'm just gonna put what happened and let you tell me what I should've done....

Legit. downloaded a bunch of pad sounds, except they're all Great Long Drones on one note. They're Worship Pads, they're gorgeous except you can't play tunes with them! So I used Audacity to cut chunks out of all of them and chucked one into Kontakt thinking I could just play it up and down the keyboard like a preset.

Except I couldn't - if I changed the note more than a semitone or so, it sounded odd. Research told me you've got to - sorry if I get the tech. term wrong here - map the sample to a key, am I right? But I've got zero idea how to do that.

So how do I get a sample and turn it into a sound I can play tunes with/on, like it's a preset on something? I've got 16 samples, 16 different gorgeous pad sounds, each on a different chromatic note. So one different gorgeous pad sound droning for 8 minutes on each tone/semitone.

How do I make them playable? (KISS - Keep It Simple for Stupid here!)

Yours hopefully

Chris. (I'm 32-bit. If instead of the above, you know of any pad libraries for 32-bit Kontakt, I'll happily buy them. I just love New Age music and the pad sounds they use and can't find any! No idea what VSTs/libraries they use, they won't tell me, and they all WERE around in 32-bit days cos I've got the albums!) But if there's a way to sample pads and turn them into playable sounds......!!
ulrichburke
Regular
Posts: 138 Joined: Wed Mar 07, 2007 12:00 am

Re: How do you make a sample playable like a preset?

Post by RichardT »

What version of Kontakt are you using Chris? I would expect there would be some pad sounds in the factory library. Have you had a look there?
RichardT
Jedi Poster
Posts: 4074 Joined: Fri Aug 13, 2004 12:00 am Location: Ireland

Re: How do you make a sample playable like a preset?

Post by Eddy Deegan »

ulrichburke wrote: Tue Aug 09, 2022 9:53 pm ... downloaded a bunch of pad sounds, except they're all Great Long Drones on one note
...
So I used Audacity to cut chunks out of all of them and chucked one into Kontakt thinking I could just play it up and down the keyboard like a preset.

Except I couldn't - if I changed the note more than a semitone or so, it sounded odd. Research told me you've got to - sorry if I get the tech. term wrong here - map the sample to a key, am I right? But I've got zero idea how to do that.

I'm afraid your options are limited with regards to those sounds. When sampling an instrument of any kind (synth or acoustic) with a view to creating a playable 'like a preset' version of it, standard practice is to take a number of samples of the original instrument at different pitches.

Just as you discovered, transposing a sample more than a few tones results in something of an unnatural/weird effect and although software is pretty good at it these days it's never going to match the results one gets if the original sound is sampled every 5 tones (or ideally, every single semitone) such that any given sample only has to be transposed in a short direction up or down before the next sample takes over.

There may be some suggestions people can make to improve the results you're getting from a single sample but in truth it's an uphill battle. For reference, the acoustic piano in a sample-based synth is created by sampling anything from every half-octave to sampling every single note individually (and often at different velocities as well).

Key-mapping is the art/science of taking a bunch of samples across a range of pitches and/or weight of keystrikes and assigning them intelligently to the keys on the sampler such that no individual note is pitch-shifted more than a few tones up or down.
User avatar
Eddy Deegan
Moderator
Posts: 8736 Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2004 12:00 am Location: Brighton & Hove, UK
Some of my works | The SOS Forum Album projects  

Re: How do you make a sample playable like a preset?

Post by Tomás Mulcahy »

Erm, ulrich asked this question already, and got perfectly good answers...

https://www.soundonsound.com/forum/view ... 55#p823455
User avatar
Tomás Mulcahy
Frequent Poster (Level2)
Posts: 2552 Joined: Wed Apr 25, 2001 12:00 am Location: Cork, Ireland.

Re: How do you make a sample playable like a preset?

Post by Eddy Deegan »

Thanks Tomás, good spot.

As there is an existing topic, I'm locking this one to avoid confusion.

ulrichburke, please don't post the same question in multiple topics as it results in fragmented answers and information can be duplicated and overlooked in equal measure in the replies. Thank you!
User avatar
Eddy Deegan
Moderator
Posts: 8736 Joined: Wed Sep 01, 2004 12:00 am Location: Brighton & Hove, UK
Some of my works | The SOS Forum Album projects  
Locked