1010Music tangerine: Sampling electric piano

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Before I get too far ahead of myself, here are a few tips, tricks and observations while sampling electric piano with 1010Music tangerine.

Velocity levels

In my initial review, I called tangerine “Samplerobot in a tiny box.” As long as you are willing to live within tangerine’s limitations, that impression is true. Samplerobot offers far more sampling options and tools than tangerine, however. Take sample rate and depth, for example. tangerine is limited to 48kHz, 24-bit. Samplerobot supports all the standard rates and depths. Now, 48kHz, 24-bit ain’t bad although you may need to down- or up-sample to another rate or depth depending upon your target.

tangerine offers the most useful sampling control parameters: note range, maximum velocity level, number of velocity levels, and interval between samples. When you specify two or more velocity levels, tangerine computes the specific velocity levels to be collected based upon the maximum velocity level. For two levels and a maximum velocity of 100, tangerine will sample at 50 and 100. For three levels, tangerine samples at 33, 66, and 100.

If you’re sampling an instrument like an analog synth with a “continuous” sound from 0 to 100, that’s OK and convenient. However, you would like to have more control over the specific velocities when sampling “discontinuous” instruments like electric piano, e.g.:

       Range      Source sound
    -----------   ----------------
      1 to  75    Soft EP sound
     76 to 104    Medium EP sound
    105 to 115    Soft EP bark
    116 to 127    Loud EP bark

This is a real-world example of the split points in a sample-playback, electric piano voice.

Given tangerine’s scheme for velocity selection, you cannot find a combination of parameters to capture at least one sample from each source level. Further, you would like to capture at the high end of each source range in order maximize input signal strength. More control is needed.

So, in the end, I captured each source range individually. I merged the source samples into a single directory for convenience — “packing” in 1010Music terminology.

Smpl and Inst tags

This leads to the next problem which is assigning file names such that tangerine can sort out root note, note ranges and velocity levels.

Quoting the manual:

To find the Root Note and velocity information, the tangerine looks in the following places, in the following order until it finds what it needs :

  1. SMPL tags of the WAV files
  2. INST tags of the WAV files
  3. The file names for the WAVs

When parsing the file names, it looks for the following format:

[Text name] + [ - or _ ] + [note number] + [ - or _ ] + [Vel1] + [ - or _ ] + [Vel2]

The [note number] will be interpreted as a decimal MIDI Note number. If [Vel1] and [Vel2] are both found, it will use them as the lowest and highest velocities where this WAV should be applied. If only [Vel1] is available, it will use that as the center point for the range of velocities when this WAV should be applied.

So, set the file names appropriately and away we go. Wrong!

What the manual does not tell you is that tangerine writes SMPL and INST chunks into its sample files. When tangerine loads one of its own sample files, it finds the note and velocity information in the SMPL and INST chunks and it ignores the note/velocity information in the file name, i.e., it never gets to step 3 in the prioritized search sequence above.

I worked around this issue by stripping the SMPL and INST chunks from the sample files. Turns out, if you load a tangerine sample file into Audacity, Audacity discards the SMPL and INST chunks. It’s a simple, but tedious matter of loading all of the sample files into Audacity and then exporting them (via export multiple).

Modulation improvements are needed

If you sample the source instrument dry (no effects), you may be disappointed at first listen. The sampled instrument might sound lifeless without a dynamic, evolving sound.

No problem, you say, add modulation. Unfortunately, tangerine comes up short in a few critical ways:

  • The envelope generator cannot modulate the filter.
  • The LFO cannot modulate effect parameters.

Fortunately, the LFO can modulate Level, Pitch, and Pan yielding tremolo, vibrato and auto-pan effects. Even a barely audible tremolo adds life to a dry electric piano sound.

tangerine effects are spartan: delay and reverb. What really hurts is the lack of LFO modulation. In the case of the delay stage, you cannot module Delay Time. Thus, any attempt at a convincing chorus effect is doomed to fail. Kiss phaser good-bye, too.

Although I’m loath to cooking in effects, I sampled some instruments with a touch of room reverb. This creates a dab of ambience as though the instrument was sampled in a small room.

I hope 1010Music continue to improve tangerine, especially its modulation and effect capabilities.

Copyright © 2024 Paul J. Drongowski