Recording - June 2013 - 34

By Yuval Shrem

Often people ask me what makes a MIDI mock-up work.
What creates that magic that turns multi-sample libraries
and multi-sample based virtual instruments into seemingly
living and breathing musical creatures, filled with emotional expression? What separates those who “get it” from
those who don’t? Why do some people’s mock-ups sound
near-perfect and others’ sound like mechanical toys? In this
article I’ll try to answer those questions the best I can, and
offer pointers and guidelines to expressive, hyper-realistic
multi-sample-based mock-ups.
I’m going to deliberately avoid library specific techniques and
mixing techniques, and focus on principles and concepts that can
improve your MIDI mock-ups, no matter which virtual instruments
you use. Also, there are mock-ups that are made only to pitch an
arrangement, which is intended to eventually be performed by
live players, and mock-ups that are meant to be used as a final
product. This article is aimed at the latter. I’ve provided some web
links below, and a few examples that you can find at
www.recordingmag.com/resources/resourceDetail/397.html
Some of the techniques and concepts listed here may
seem familiar, while others are introduced here for the
first time. The first and possibly most important concept
I will be addressing in this article, one that I haven’t
seen mentioned anywhere else, is the principle I call
“Real-Time Editor”.
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RECORDING June 2013

You’re not playing—you’re editing!
When using a multi-sample library or a sample based virtual instrument,
you’re not really playing an instrument. You’re not actually producing the
sound from a physical instrument, acting as an instrument player, but
rather you’re acting as a real-time editor. This might be a little counter-intuitive, as you would typically play the parts using your MIDI keyboard,
which feels very much like playing, not editing, but as I’ll explain here, in
reality you are merely editing musical elements into music in real time.
With your MIDI keyboard, you are merely triggering the digital
playback of the recordings of notes that have already been played
by someone else, who likely never heard your music. These notes
that were played outside of the context of your music, are the pieces
of a musical puzzle that you are putting together, creating a new
context for those notes though what is essentially editing.
Understanding and acknowledging this concept is crucial in your
quest for creating ultra-realistic MIDI mock-ups. So you might think:
This is all very well in theory, but what does that mean in practice?
Well, that means several things:
This means you can only use what has already been played and
recorded by the developers of the sample library. You can only use the
existing recordings that are included in the sample library and
rearrange them creatively in order to create music.
It also means that if the samples in the library were not expressive
or were played with a certain musical expression that doesn’t match
what you are trying to play, it is most likely not going to sound very

http://www.recordingmag.com/resources/resourceDetail/397.html

Recording - June 2013

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