So I started sampling my guitar...

[Kool Dude]

Hey everyone, I hope this is the right place for this, but just as a test... I started sampling my guitar. It's something I have wanted to do for a while now, but I lacked the knowledge to do so, even now I have no clue how to add all those fancy features you can hear in Electri6ity and Prominy SC... but I thought I would try and see what I can come up with...

Has anyone else ever tried sampling a guitar or any instrument? If so, do you have any general advice that you could give when sampling instruments?

Here are two tracks I did real quick using what I have accomplished so far. They're covers of "Chelsea Smile" by Bring Me The Horizon and "You Aint No Family" by IWRESTLEDABEARONCE
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3980536/Chelsea%20Smile%20KontaktGuitar.mp3

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3980536/You%20Aint%20No%20Family%20KontaktGuitar.mp3

I'm positive that the mixes are terrible, but oh well.

So far I'm really lacking a lot of stuff, it's still in its early stages, and what you're hearing is what I've accomplished over one night.

Let me know what you guys think, I'm debating whether or not it's something I should continue, if I should continue I plan to sample every fret, and every string. The only thing that is really holding me back is having to learn how to script in Kontakt.

Stay Metal! \m/

 

[Morgan C]

Sounds pretty good man. It still sounds a little MIDIish, but that so do Joey and some other guys mixes at times. A little more humanisation would help a lot. The tremolo-ish riff on the second song sounded the most fake. Dunno if all you sampled was downpicks, but it just sounds really repetitive.

 

[Kool Dude]

Hey thanks for checking it out! I sampled four down strokes, and four up strokes, maybe I need more? Maybe if I get enough, I can quadtrack the guitars. That would be a nice change in the world of sampled guitars.

Yeah I know what you mean about it sounding Midi-ish, I just imported the midi straight in my DAW and opened up Kontakt, my DAW doesn't have a way to humanize or randomize midi tracks automatically so I would have to do a lot of tweaking.

And I just discovered today that when playing a chord, Kontakt wouldplay both an up stroke and down stroke in the same chord, I found a way to fix it, so that will definitely help out with the chords sounding repetitive and fake.

I also need to record some release samples, that should definitely help out with the realism.

 

[Morgan C]

Hey thanks for checking it out! I sampled four down strokes, and four up strokes, maybe I need more? Maybe if I get enough, I can quadtrack the guitars. That would be a nice change in the world of sampled guitars.

Yeah I know what you mean about it sounding Midi-ish, I just imported the midi straight in my DAW and opened up Kontakt, my DAW doesn't have a way to humanize or randomize midi tracks automatically so I would have to do a lot of tweaking.

And I just discovered today that when playing a chord, Kontakt wouldplay both an up stroke and down stroke in the same chord, I found a way to fix it, so that will definitely help out with the chords sounding repetitive and fake.

I also need to record some release samples, that should definitely help out with the realism.

It'll be tough to get all the humanising done. It'd be awesome if you could write a script to do it all, but that means going right into the MIDI. For a chord, there'd be a very slight strum, not all the notes hitting at once. For tremolos, they tend to be a little messy but it doesn't matter too much, and they need to alternate up/down, not just random. Guitars are hard to sample.

 

[Trevoire520]

I'm not quite getting why you'd want to do this to be honest? It's bad enough having programmed drums and trillian bass all over everything at the moment without throwing sampled guitars into the mix aswell.

 

[LeSedna]

I was expecting worse results technically given how you made that. It's actually something one could use in an electro/indus project.

It still sounds weird more sonically than technically to me, I cannot know if it's the way you tweak your ampsim of if it's your actual recording.

 

[Kool Dude]

It'd be awesome if you could write a script to do it all, but that means going right into the MIDI.

Yeah I definitely would love to be able to script in Kontakt, I have some ideas, and strumming is one of them, but learning how exactly will suck.

I'm not quite getting why you'd want to do this to be honest? It's bad enough having programmed drums and trillian bass all over everything at the moment without throwing sampled guitars into the mix aswell.

I'm not the best when it comes to playing, I'm better at writing music than playing guitar, so it really sucks for me. If I can manage to create a sampled guitar that sounds somewhat realistic when it comes to metal, then I'll be happy

It still sounds weird more sonically than technically to me, I cannot know if it's the way you tweak your ampsim of if it's your actual recording.

To be honest, I only sampled one note on the guitar and stretched it out across the entire map, so perhaps this is why it's sounding strange. I intend to sample every string, and every fret, if I keep going with this.

 

[ForHerDeadEyes]

Has anyone else ever tried sampling a guitar or any instrument? If so, do you have any general advice that you could give when sampling instruments?

Let me know what you guys think, I'm debating whether or not it's something I should continue, if I should continue I plan to sample every fret, and every string. The only thing that is really holding me back is having to learn how to script in Kontakt.

Stay Metal! m/

I've sampled drums, bass, guitar and various stuff..
I listened to your samples..
Didn't sound that bad.. still it has that stale robotic feel to it..

I'll sample my guitar again.. But this time only for effect purposes..
I'd say that it's unnecessary to sample all the frets..

Just sample the 0 - 5 on every string.. but on the last and highest string you can can go to the highest fret.. maybe do it on the lowest as well..
It'll save you a lot of time..

I've used Battery for my samples.. and made some kits..
It's fairly easy to do it with Battery..
I also have the Kontakt vst that comes with Steven Slate Drums..
But haven't tried making anything of my own in it.. except custom Slate kits..

Sampling guitar will to make it sound good is tough..
Just use it as a substitute for testing ideas.. not on your "real" recordings..
Good for knowing how your own guitar would sound in the context, I guess..

I'd place the effects like muted and short chug etc, at the lowest velocities..
Also.. you may want to downtune the lowest string to get some lower tunings.. just in case you want to go lower..

 

[JoergieN]

The funny thing is one time I used my midi controller to play some acoustic guitar stuff. Then just for shits and giggles I decided to put POD Farm behind it and tweaked it to my likings and got a similar result. Didn't sound quite as good as yours but it did sound decent. Is that the method that you used? Did you just sample DI's then use an amp sim on it afterwards?

 

[Ryuno]

can you post the DI for one of the songs? II'd like to try it with a new distortion I've been working on.

 

[JoergieN]

I don't have any DI's for it. I was just doodling with and acoustic guitar VSTi and put POD Farm behind it in my signal chain and got a similar thing that you did. That's why I asked if you just sampled guitar DI's and used an amp sim for the distortion

 

[Kool Dude]

Just sample the 0 - 5 on every string.. but on the last and highest string you can can go to the highest fret.. maybe do it on the lowest as well..
It'll save you a lot of time..

I was checking out some of the samples in Evolution Electric Guitar, and I noticed that only every few frets were sampled on every string. I thought that wasn't a bad idea, perhaps I'd do the same if I was getting too lazy to sample all the frets, like 0, 3, 6, 9, and 12?

I'd place the effects like muted and short chug etc, at the lowest velocities..

That's what I did, I hate having keyswitches and and all that other stuff slowing me down, so I threw the PalmMutes and the Hammer On in there to be triggered by velocity.

Did you just sample DI's then use an amp sim on it afterwards?

Yeah pretty much. When I was doing tests, I sampled a lot of crap, what was really giving me problems were the PalmMutes, when I'd make my intrument patch and load the samples, apply my amp sim, I noticed that my palm mutes sound extremely... bleh... Finally I tried it again and decided to turn up the volume before rendering it. I cranked it up and threw a limiter on their to avoid it from clipping. This solved the crappy palm mute problem. I don't know if this was the correct thing to do, but the results weren't terrible, so... yeah...

Once I figure out exactly how a guitar should be sampled, then I'll redo it. At the moment I'm holding off sampling the rest until I know the correct way of doing so.

can you post the DI for one of the songs? II'd like to try it with a new distortion I've been working on.

Sure thing! Here's Chelsea Smile, if you would like You Aint No Family as well, just let me know.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3980536/Chelsea%20Smile%20DI.mp3

 

[Ryuno]

Never mind, it didn't went very well here.