The virtual instruments |
What is a virtual instrument? [Light] [Beginner] [Professional] [Notation] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] [Drums and Percussion] [Guitar] [Choir] [Keyboard] [Soloist] Before version 3.4, Pizzicato was only able to play a music
score through MIDI interfaces and synthesizers existing on the
sound card or as component parts of Windows or Mac OS X. With
that limitation, Pizzicato had no way of improving or modifying
the final sound quality of the music. The principle of MIDI
playing is to send a series of commands telling what instrument
must play and what are the notes to play, but nothing is said
about the sound quality. So the final result was completely
dependent on the sound card or external synthesizer. The same
Pizzicato score could sound very badly or very nicely, according
to the sound card or the synthesizer you had. This limitation is also true for all music software that are
limited to MIDI playing. To achieve a sound quality that is
independent of a sound card, a hardware synthesizer or a software
synthesizer, a music software must create the sound itself of the
instruments and send it directly to the sound card. This requires
two things. The first is the ability to compute in real time or
in advance, the resulting sound of several instruments playing
together, including the correct pitch of notes, the envelopes,
vibrato effects,... The second is to have a good quality sound
library, consisting of samples of real instruments that have been
recorded from live musicians. We are happy to announce that with
version 3.4, Pizzicato now includes these two features. Using virtual instruments requires much more processor power,
memory and hard disk resources than playing MIDI. The sound
library delivered with Pizzicato is the Papelmedia library
(original site: http://www.papelmedia.de/english/index.htm
). ARPEGE has bought the rights to distribute the Papelmedia library
with all versions of Pizzicato. When you install the sound
libraries, you need about 1.2 GB (1200 MB) on the hard disk. According to the number of instruments playing together and
the density of notes in the score, the processing power of a
given computer may not be enough to play it all in real time. To
avoid this problem, Pizzicato has a buffered playback function.
This means that the sound of measures may be computed by
Pizzicato in the background and stored in memory buffers. When
Pizzicato plays the score, it plays the measures back from the
buffers. You can in fact combine real time playing with buffered
playing and select which instruments play in real time or not.
You can of course also combine these virtual instruments with
standard MIDI instruments. Even if your computer is slow and does not have too much
memory, you will be able to create an audio WAV file with the
quality of the sound library. In future versions of Pizzicato, we
will work on the speed and optimization of the audio playback
functions in real time, so that more and more computers will be
able to play all instruments in real time. A virtual instrument is a structure that can be used by
Pizzicato to generate the sound of an instrument or any kind of
sound (explosion, birds singing, or any real world sound sample
or synthesized sound in fact). In Pizzicato Light and Beginner,
you can only use the General MIDI instruments of the library. In Pizzicato Professional and Composition Pro,
a virtual instrument is in fact a synthesis structure that can be
created, modified, used, combined or imported from SoundFont
files, as we will see in this lesson. The full editing features
of a virtual instrument will be explained in another lesson,
called Modular audio synthesis. Using the virtual instruments [Light] [Beginner] [Professional] [Notation] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] [Drums and Percussion] [Guitar] [Choir] [Keyboard] [Soloist] By default, a Pizzicato score does not contain any virtual
instrument. Instruments are defined by default to use the sound
card MIDI synthesizer. You can see the virtual instruments just above the first
measure of the staves. They are represented by the Since version 3.5.3, you can directly change an existing
virtual instrument by changing the instrument selection in
the instruments view. To remove a virtual instrument from the score, point its
icon with the mouse and use the delete key or the backspace
key. In Pizzicato Professional, we will see in the next
section, a more advanced way to manipulate the virtual
instruments in a score. You can also assign a virtual instrument only to one or
more staves. To do that, select the staves you want with the
selection tool (see the lesson on selecting
measures ) and then use the Edit, Assign
virtual instruments to staves... menu item. If you do
not select staves, all staves are assigned to virtual
instruments. When you have MIDI instruments and virtual instruments
playing together in the same score, you may hear some timing
difference between them. The most common case will be the MIDI instruments reacting
faster than the virtual instruments. You can compensate this
delay by the MIDI delay in milliseconds (correction for
audio) slider that you will find in the Options,
MIDI play option... menu item. In case of the virtual instruments reacting faster than
the MIDI instruments (this may happen if the MIDI instrument
is also a software synthesizer, slower than Pizzicato), you
can slow down the audio reaction time of Pizzicato by
increasing slightly (by steps of 50 units for instance) the
output buffer size text box that you can find in the Options,
Audio setup... menu item. At any time, it displays the activity of the virtual
instrument player. You can adjust the volume with the
sliders. If the sound level is too high, the bargraph will
show a red portion. This means that the sound experiences a
distortion and you should then decrease the volume level, as
the sound quality will be bad. The bottom bar shows how much
work Pizzicato must still do to complete the buffers of the
audio playback system. You can keep this window open if you
want. The virtual instruments library [Professional] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] In Pizzicato Professional and Composition,
in addition to the features already explained above, you have
full access to the music composition sound libraries through the
conductor view. The principle is that you can select a virtual
instrument from the library and drag it to the score. You can
also duplicate instruments, edit them, create new ones or import
them from SoundFont files found on the Internet. We will first explore the Papelmedia library,
which is the default library Pizzicato uses when you assign
instruments automatically. You can now listen to the score. The flute will be played
by Pizzicato as an audio virtual instrument from the Papelmedia
flute samples. You can now listen to the score. You can remove a virtual instrument just by pointing the
mouse on it and by using the delete or backspace key. Most sound card now provide some reverberation effects
that can greatly improve the sound result. You should try it.
Check your sound card help file and control panel to see how
it can generate such an effect and how much effect gives the
best result. This feature must be adjusted outside Pizzicato
and is only related to your sound card. You will notice that there is another library tree called Papelmedia
- SoundFont version. These sounds were imported from the
original library as soundfont players. They can not be modified
in Pizzicato. You can use them in place of other Papelmedia
library. Some synthesized sounds may be played more accurately,
but they will require more processing power. However, the
differences will be minor. We suggest to use the Papelmedia folder,
as all sounds have been reviewed and a few bugs fixed as compared
to the original SoundFont library (looping problems, levels
adjustments, some notes that were missing,...). The Sampled Sounds originaly contains a percussion
map with special percussive effects. You can explore the Synthesized Sounds folder, as it
contains many special sounds examples from what you can do with
the modular synthesizer included in Pizzicato. Theses
synthesizers will be treated in the lesson on Modular
audio synthesis. Meanwhile, you can use them exactly as
explained above to assign them to a staff to play the notes. The Components folder may not be used as such. The
items of this folder are components that can be assembled to
create a synthesizer. You will find them useful in the Modular audio synthesis lesson. You can double-click a virtual synthesizer icon directly from
the score. Its editing window will display. You will find all
details on this also in the lesson about the audio synthesizers. Importing SoundFont files [Professional] [Composition Pro] A SoundFont file is a series of samples of
one or more instruments. This file format is quite popular on the
Internet, and you can find thousands of these files. You can buy
SoundFont files, but you will also find lots of them for free. It
opens Pizzicato and your music composition to a world of new
sounds. When you download a SoundFont file, please read the licence
contract. You will find a lot of files that were created by
independent musicians for their own use and given freely for
downloading by the Internet community. The licence may authorize
you to use them in public records or not. It all depends on the
author of the SoundFont, so you should refer to the site for this
kind of information and respect the rules of copyrights. A SoundFont file has the "sf2" extension. Here is
how to import a SoundFont file. We will take an example from the
site http://www.fox-gieg.com/rkhive/banks.html.
In that page you will find a link entitled "Best Trumpet".
Click that link and choose to save the file for instance on the
desktop. The file is named besttrm.zip. Unzip this file
and you will have a file named besttrm.sf2 on the
desktop. You have two options to import a SoundFont file. The first
option imports the file as a SoundFont reader. The resulting
sound may be more accurate but will need more processing
power. Also, you will not be able to modify the sound
parameters. The second option imports the file as a series of samples
and all their parameters. This format is specific to
Pizzicato and you can then edit all sound parameters, as will
be explained in the lesson on audio synthesizers. This is the
default choice, as most of the time there will be no
difference with the SoundFont player and it will be less
processor power consuming. You can also ask to sort the banks and instruments inside
the file. This is true by default, as it helps to find
instruments in a file containing several sounds. These virtual instruments may now be used as any others
inside Pizzicato scores. You can drag and drop them inside a
measure and Pizzicato will play the sound. You should know that a virtual synthesizer is copied into
a Pizzicato document, but the audio samples are NOT copied.
When importing a SoundFont file, Pizzicato creates a
sub-folder in the Audio / SoundFonts folder of the
library and stores the audio samples there as WAV files. You
can see this very easily in the library: So if you send a score to a friend, you should also send
him the SoundFont file so that he can import it and hear the
same sounds as your original score. If you export the score
to a WAV file, this is of course not needed, as the WAV file
will contain the full sound created from the score. You will notice that any WAV sound that is displayed in
the library may be double-clicked. The audio editor window of
Pizzicato is then opened. You can also select a file in the
tree (by clicking on it) and then click the play button and
you will hear the audio file play. Tuning [Professional] [Composition Pro] As Pizzicato generates the sounds of
virtual instruments, it has the control of the exact pitch
(frequency) of each note. By default, the standard scale of
frequency is used, as found on a piano. This is the equal
temperament scale. Standard sound cards and synthesizers are all
tuned on this base. Contemporary music, baroque music, ethnic music or
experimental music may need to use scales that are not tuned that
way or that contain more or less steps than 12 per octave.
Pizzicato Professional can help you to design such a scale and
the score will be played accordingly. The list displays all notes and their respective
frequencies. By default, the scale is computed automatically using the
parameters displayed in the top right frame. Two parameters
influence the tuning. The first one is the reference note and
its frequency. Very often the A3 note is used as a reference
to 440 Hz. You can change the tuning here. You may also
select another note as a reference frequency. The second
parameter is the number of division for an octave. The
standard value is 12 half tones. If you set if for instance
to 24, you will have a full quarter tone scale. Any change of
these parameters will update the list of frequencies. Using more or less than 12 steps per octave will create
very special harmonies. You may be quite disappointed by
trying to compose music with such a tuning, as most of the
standard harmony rules do not apply anymore. You have to
develop new approaches to find which notes will go together
and build nice chords. This becomes very experimental. Note
that the standard notation also will be disappointing, as the
note names and position will still be the same, but the half
steps will no more correspond. Composing music in such a case
may be more easy by using the graphic note editor window and
just ignore the note names. If you disable the Automatic calculation frame,
you can modify each frequency manually. To do so, click on
one line of the list and you can change its frequency with
the text box just below the list. Once you have designed a scale (whether automatically or
manually), you can give it a title and you can save it to
disk with the Save this tuning... button, so that
you can use it in other scores. Pizzicato asks for a file
name and saves it. When you open another score, you can use
the same dialog and click the Open a tuning...
button so as to load the file previously saved. You will find
a few prepared scales in the default folder. A tuning is
specific to one score only and it is also saved within the
Pizzicato document. If you send a score with a custom tuning
to a friend, he will be able to hear it with the custom
tuning. Please note that the tuning will NOT affect MIDI playback.
Only virtual instruments will play according to the tuning
you specify.
. The score is displayed with the
reference marks:
icon followed by the name of the
instruments. They are visible when the reference marks tool
is activated (its shortcut is ":").
button in the score window tool
bar. The dialog that appears show a popup menu called Audio
playing mode. This menu has three possible choices:
(shortcut ":") and the
score will display the position of the virtual
instrument:
button on the score tool bar.
Click the Tuning... button. The following dialog
appears: