November, 2001
I recently purchased Unity DS-1 (2.x version) for the Mac. I'm completely new to sampling per se, having in the past always used <gasp> GeneralMIDI gear, such as my Yamaha MU100R - a cool and capable piece of gear, but cheaply manufactured - needed "resoldering" on two separate occasions.
Having spent the last several weeks doing some intensive poking around in Unity, (mostly to tweak the couple of sample libraries I bought for use with same) I finally felt ready to try making a sampled instrument myself, from scratch. To my surprise, it turned out to be fairly easy to do.
Not to give the impression that Unity is a straightforward program to use. Owing to the sketchiness of the documentation supplied with the program, you're essentially "on your own" when it comes to really understanding how the program structures instruments, effects routings and parameters, etc. But once you learn a bit about how Unity is structuring its patches, it's a pretty straightforward process to make your own samples, or even to tweak published sample libraries.
So, I looked around my home for something that would make a good first project. I realized I had the ideal instrument - an old Rhythm Craft metal xylophone. Ideal, that is, because it has a range of only one and a half octaves. And of course, with a xylophone, you don't have very many playing styles to cover, sampling-wise.
The sampled instrument is pretty basic - just one sample per note (unlooped, with full decay for each note). But I have to say it came out pretty decently. If it sounds a tad bright, this is principally due to the fact that the beater (the stick you use to play the thing) went bust a long time back, and I had to find a creative alternate implement with which to strike the notes. I will not say what that implement is, except that if you were to guess its identity as being a heavy metal ballpoint pen, you would be right on most major accounts. Anyway, you can always EQ it down a bit, if desired.
xylophone.sea
(4.2 megs) |
