Yeah, Clara is great! We felt we couldn’t just have fake cello at the start and then not let her play something for real 😅

It’s a relief to not trick people in this case! 😂 Good ears! 👍🏻

That, and the bowing doesn’t match, and there’s vibrato when her hand is still… amazing sound quality for samples though!

The bowing was the giveaway for me yeah, but I didn’t want it to be 100% either, it was really weird editing it 😂 It got into the uncanny valley quite quickly, and we even tried to match the room sound up a bit as well

@@alexlamymusic I bet! Fantastic job on the sound. I had it on in the background and didn’t think twice about that first tremolo, thought it was a real instrument playing. Is that an OT solo strings library?

@@simonpassmore Yeah, it’s their Nocturne Cello.

@@alexlamymusic Really impressive stuff. Great videos too!

That’s not a bad idea, maybe down the line a general mixing tips video could be good. I can give you a bit of advice in meantime though! With sampled strings (or any samples actually) don’t make the mistake of assuming you always need to cut things out. They’re recordings at the end of the day, and they may have been processed, they may have lots of mics on offer, or they may be very raw and unprocessed. Listen first, look with a spectrum analyser too. Assuming your dealing with an unprocessed (as it was recorded) library, like Berlin Strings for example. The first thing is to get the sound you want with the mic mix. The second is, if you’re using reverb, is that causing muddiness or harshness? And if so, eq the reverb send (before the reverb plugin) instead of the strings - don’t take away frequencies for the sake of it. Then lastly, eq the strings. The most common thing that makes string samples sound a bit fake is when lots of notes are playing at once, the noise and the room tone is being multiplied as well, mostly the noise around the bowing of the strings, around 2-3kHz. Pulling a little bit of that out can help. Muddiness for our ears tends to build up a lot between 150-220hz. I’m constantly taming resonance at 190-200hz, even in live string recordings, where lots of the resonance of a room can come out. Listen to cellos and basses in that area, and a good practice is to use a dynamic eq there, rather than pull them all out completely. Overall sound can be helped a bit by scooping or boosting the low mids around 400-900hz too. I find some libraries can sound already too scooped out, and adding a couple of dB here adds a bit of richness in, or sometimes a smaller room, or ribbon/vintage mics can overemphasise this area, and little reduction can help a library blend with another set of samples. Hope that’s a useful start! 👍🏻

@@alexlamymusic this is an entire episode's worth of content in one comment! Thank you! This is all going into my study / practice notes. In the meantime I'll quantize everything to fu-

Love that idea, thank you 🙏

Yeah, Swam and SampleModelling both have to receive CC11 before they can trigger, unless you tell them otherwise. It's also tone as well as volume. It doesn't sound the same as CC7 which is just volume. On an an analogue synth I may send it to envelope depth, so it could be effecting an amp and a filter envelope.

Hi Martijn, have you done the fader assignment via the browser configuration page? I'm using the MC-8 in Logic with the two CCs on adjacant faders. But as the assignment is done within the hardware it should be independent from the DAW.

I would also like to know. It doesn't seem to have any brand name printed on it.

I do the same to get more of a legato between notes. That helps when your samples don't have true legato.

Hi Steven. The reasoning is different depending on the patch. Legato patches need the notes to overlap to trigger the transition between two notes, and it doesn’t matter how long they overlap, unless you want to extend them beyond the next note so that you go back and forth between two notes (which is easier when playing things in live). With sustains, a very small overlap means you’re disguising the release of one sample into the attack of the next, and gets you a more natural transition. With the expressive samples, it’s about where you need the sample to actually stop. Some you can allow to play the whole sample - in this case, finish the whole bowing. But some might have conflicting harmony, and so you end them more intentionally. There’s no specific amount for the overlap, it’s just whatever works for that patch.

It’s a nakedboards MC-8. Didn’t measure the throw, but it’s quite good. Doesn’t take up much space on the desk either! At home mine is a bit more bulky 😅

It's the Nakedboards MC-8 and the throw is about 72mm.

The maker and developer of the MC-8 (MC: MIDI Controller with 8 faders hebben this name) is Nikolay Ershov from Moscow. A very nice controllers that’s not overpriced.

Hence this name!

Most libraries work the way we describe in the video, with East West being the only exception I know of beyond much more complicated patches. Not sure we can do the manuals for all of those in the video though! 😅 What were the other problems?