Suggestions for OASYS Forum and OASYS Sound Developers

[Charlie]

Tja, KARO macht's wieder gut !

Der war gut!

Looking forward to the FM-libraries, too!

[peter m. mahr]

ich meld mich heute abend bei dir.

ciao
peter

[Kevin Nolan]

This is a fantastic thread!

Power users offering fantastic insight into velocity layering - really must check this out; and Karo developing buckets of new programs and libraries in the coming months (to say nothing of Sharp's exciting plans for OASYS community-based plans and new libraries as mentioned on another thread) - phew!

The Karo Mellotron library sounds very exciting. Regarding your orchestral percussion - please consider offering a very large gong, and good timpani (tough I know!)

Kevin.

[vortex]

Well done Kevin and Daz et al. Perhaps this is the silver lining to the recent Korg news. Perhaps we will now become a community of active programmers rather than the passive preset users I suspect many, including me, currently are.

[Kevin Nolan]

Another thought for future expansion:

- Sampled TR808
- Sampled Linndrum and Linndrum II

...but - with the original preset patterns programmed as GE's through Stephen Kay's Karma Oasys software and sold as loadable GE's along with the samples; making the OASYS a super powerful karmafied emulation of those original drum machine masters.

Actually - something related to that using the OASYS inbuild drum kits could be to record the MIDI pattern archives within the RM1X and Electribes into Stephen Kay's Karma OASYS Software and make GE's out of them - kind of converting / transferring those great programmed groove boxs into Karmafied groove boxes within the OASYS. It would take a lot of work but would provide a whole new dimension to live groove playing through Karma within the OASYS. The possibilities are endless...

Kevin.

[fdspeck]

You seem to be taking good advantage of these features - I'd love to hear a few of your sounds to see what you're doing. Care to share?

Unfortunately the sounds I have created are based on samples from professional libraries and because of that I can't share them easily. But maybe there are ways to get them released. In one case I'm in contact with the company who owns the copyrights.

For the multilayer electric piano sounds I converted the samples of a well known library. I had this idea of creating an electric piano EXs and my conversion shows how it could look like. I think the sounds are convincing and would have been a good selling feature for the Oasys if it would have lasted longer.

The round robin feature I need for converting the electric guitar and bass samples from Pettinhouse on which I work at the moment. After I discovered how good the amp simulations of the Oasys really are I searched for dry unprocessed samples and the Pettinhouse library was what I found. Combining them with the amp simulations leads to interesting results, way better than all the electric guitar samples recorded with amp.

Another thing I need for converting this library is something like key switches. Key switches may be standard for software samplers but for some unknown reason the manufacturers of hardware synths until now refused to implement such a feature. But if you use an external controller there is a trick for doing key switches with the Oasys. Define a CC for switching thru the multisamples of a wave sequence and let i.e. the pads of a PadKontrol send different fixed CC values. Thus you can use the pads for doing key switches. Unfortunately the pads of the Oasys are not able to send fixed CC values internally, otherwise you could do this without using an external controller. Even real keys switches would have been a breeze to implement for Korg. Just let the user define some keys of the keyboard which send fixed CC values instead of note on/off values. That's all, the other things would be done by the wave sequence.

-Frank-

[jerrythek]

You could consider using your sounds in Sequencer Mode, and setting up some RPPR patterns to do the keyswitches for you, with the RPPR triggers assigned to the pads.

A bit of a "wide" work-around, but it would do what you are looking for.

Right?

Regards,

Jerry

P.S. I understand about the copyright issues, of course. Still, it sounds exciting, glad to see you really using the capabilities of the OASYS so well.

[oasys76]

I had this idea of creating an electric piano EXs and my conversion shows how it could look like. I think the sounds are convincing and would have been a good selling feature for the Oasys if it would have lasted longer.

Hi fdspeck,

try the KARO electric pianos. I myself have already heard a lot of E-piano plugins but shure the KARO Rhodes is the best thing I ever heard

Oasys76

[peter m. mahr]

- Sampled TR808
- Sampled Linndrum and Linndrum II

...but - with the original preset patterns programmed as GE's through Stephen Kay's Karma Oasys software and sold as loadable GE's along with the samples; making the OASYS a super powerful karmafied emulation of those original drum machine masters.

I find this in general a very interesting idea, KARO drum samples / drum machine sounds together with KARMA GE's.

peter

[fdspeck]

Hi fdspeck,
try the KARO electric pianos. I myself have already heard a lot of E-piano plugins but shure the KARO Rhodes is the best thing I ever heard

Actually the Karo library doesn't match what I looked for. I don't want to diminish the work of Karo. I'm sure these are very well sounding samples, like you said. But in my experience 4 velocity layers are not enough for Rhodes or Wurlitzer sounds. For acoustic pianos for instance you can get very convincing results with 4 velocity layers and clever filtering for smoothing between layers. But for the way the overtones are changing with velocity for electric pianos filters won't help very much and only many velocity layers will do.

You have to make compromises though that the samples consume not too much memory and for me that means looped samples. Now looped samples have a bad reputation dating from the time of 16MB memory limitations and the art of looping samples seems to get lost in these days of the giga-libraries. But if the loops are late in the sample and well executed it's hard to tell the difference from unlooped samples. That's because for electric pianos the overtones are virtually not changing after a few seconds. Of course the ultimate realism would be unlooped samples but for me it's just wasting memory. I have the feeling that the reason why sound designers avoid looping is more the big effort that would be needed than the quest for ultimate realism. A Rhodes patch with 12 velocity layers and 6 samples per octave has 432 samples, so that's much work if you would loop the samples manually.

With looping it was possible to get the Rhodes and Wurlitzer samples to a size lower than 300 MB and together with a Pianet sample they would fit into 660MB of memory. Originally I planed to do additional versions with double size but for the below-300MB-versions the loops were so unhearable that I skipped this plan. Thus my advice for sound designers would be that for many decaying, velocity sensitive instruments the combination of looped samples and many velocity layers would be -over all- more realistic than unlooped samples with few velocity layers.

I also discovered that contrary to all the compromises the versions I made sound much better and are more playable than the original library played via NI Kontakt. That's the Oasys factor which you also must take into account when comparing the Karo library to electric piano plugins running on a computer.

-Frank-

[Kevin Nolan]

Hi Frank -

I agree with you about 4 layers - it is not enough. I purchased all of the Karo Piano libraries and I'd say the following:

- The sampling quality is absolutely exquisite - first rate
- Many of the pianos , especially acoustic, are full of character
- Programs are variable. Some of them are absolutely fantastic; while others are not usable at all. With each library there are incredibly good an usable programs (so every library is useful) - but as you indicate, 4 layers is not enough for other programs and they are utterly unusable - you can clearly hear the change in samples from layer to layer.

Overall - if you are looking for new piano libraries for OASYS, Karo's are definitely worth the investment. All samples are impeccable, the pianos are full of character - but do expect some of the programs to be excellent while others to be unusable because of the 4-layer limit with these libraries.

Kevin.