Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

:> BTW, interesting thing about upstrokes vs down strokes. I'll have
:> to investigate more,

Oh, I play violin by the way....

If you heard the two tones, one upstroke and one down stroke side by side,
you couldn't really tell the difference.

However:

Down stoke tends to be slightly stronger, and considered the "dominant"
stroke (my terminology). If you study some string scores with bowing
notated, you'll quickly see why certain strokes are called for in specific
places.

Where bowing really comes into play is repeated notes. You can obviously
repeat the same note alternating up/down strokes. This sounds different than
repeating a note during a single bow stroke by slowing/stopping the bow.
It's almost a single vs. multiple trigger thing, but not quite.

This is the same problem you run into when trying to imitate a snare drum
roll with only a single snare sample. Although they're pretty much the same,
you really need both left and right hits to pull it off and sound decent.

Looking through some of the Garritan String samples I have here, there's
many that are set up with the keyboard split, with down strokes on one side
and up strokes on the other. Individually they sound pretty much the same,
but playing a legato passage certainly sounds more authentic when you
carefully work out the "bowing" on the keyboard the same as a real player
would do.

Runs are probably the hardest to get right. Depending on the score, a run
could be done in just one stroke, or depending on how it's phrased, divided
up over multiple strokes in one direction or another. When played on a
keyboard, each note in a run is pretty much a discrete event. When real
players do it, there's a certain amount a "smearing" going on that makes
string runs sound the way they do. About the only way to get close to that
is to overdub a number of times to build up each section, using at least 4
or 5 tracks for 1st violin, another number for 2nd...and so forth.

I really look forward to hearing what you accomplish during your quest.
Getting a great string sound is one of the things that many keyboard players
fret over and never get close, because they have trouble thinking like a
string player. You and I know this, of course, but you can't simply call up
a string patch and plonk down a series of chords and expect it to sound
anything like the real thing, regardless of how great the
samples/programming being used is. You have to be really conscious of the
phrasing and dynamics of every single voice and where it's leading to even
begin to approximate a good string section.

Good luck! Keep posting sound samples as you work on this. I'm sure I'm not
the only one interested in how it all turns out.


Les