Physical Modeling Has Gotten REALLY Good 🤯

so the primary point of the video that you are now watching is to see if we can make a realistic sounding instrumental piece of music using recorded performances of physically modeled synthesizers and no pre-recorded audio files or samples then I'll be showing you some stuff that can make some new sounds and textures and Timbers and most importantly stuff that can give you some fresh inspiration when you're tired of the same old VST plugins as you probably already know sampling would be if for example you were to record this guy playing the violin and then chop up that recording into your own samples and played the violin sounds in your own music to try and make your listeners believe that you have a violinist friend now physical modeling on the other hand is where some people spend years programming a custom sound engine allowing you to play a realistic sounding violin with a Midian expression controller to try and fool your listeners into bleeding that you have a violinist friend a good starting point to explain how physical modeling Works would be the car plus strong algorithm which pitches long Echo trails become an oscillator and here I'll just show you some delay and we need a little noise burst source of some sort we need a voltage controlled amplifier we're going to need an envelope all right let's wire it up the gate of the key press that's going to go into the gate input of the adsr or envelope then the note that I press will go into the time of the delay I'm going to have some white noise go into the input of the voltage controlled amplifier which will go out to the input of the delay and then the mix of the delay will go into and then last but not least should have been earlier to avoid that noise blast I'm going to hook the envelope into the CV input of the VCA huh just sounds like some delayed noise I'm going to make this into a really really short tick like as long as it would take for a pick to hit a guitar string I'm going to bring the time way down and the feedback way up [Music] all right things got way out of hand there all right so we have our little string pluck sound right [Music] now if we turn the attack up and the sustain can maybe be a little bit lower now all of a sudden I guess I'll want to turn the feedback down a bit and we can kind of make a string sound like a cello [Music] here's a string synthesizer that I worked up a long time ago in reactor and it sounds a lot more accurate [Music] thank you [Music] so yeah pretty powerful stuff really a whopping five years ago I made a whopping 45 minute video with a similar title to this one that covered a physical modeling instrument called Piano Tech I would say that at face value if you look at the last few versions of piano Tech it probably doesn't seem like they've added that many features but they've really improved the sound engine and I would say that now I prefer it over even my most cherished massive piano sample libraries we'll take a brief look at piano Tech a little bit later but this is sort of a follow-up video because I think we're there now now of course I don't think that sampling is or ever will be completely obsolete I think that for specific things it still has a pretty huge use for example if I were to sample an instrument that I made or a Kalimba that I bought in some Village in Kenya that being said where I do see it becoming obsolete is if you're writing a song and you want a saxophone or a cello something much broader and more General in cases like that it seems like physical modeling paired with MPE or expressive midi controllers has eclipsed the Practical usefulness of sampling traditional instruments I know right that's a bold claim and there are some caveats so MPE or midi polyphonic expression is almost operating amongst musicians as a buzzword more than it is a protocol right now it's sort of marketed as this plug-and-play way to for example get a linstrument or rolly Seaboard or Osmos to give you more expression with your plugins on your computer I'm not sure that I've ever had that experience once so MPE is the official update to the midi 1.0 protocol some companies also find similar functionality with something called Mode 4 and then midi 2.0 the bigger problem is that for this to control this in your session you will have to go through this and that works differently in every single die even with Cubase and Ableton having native MPE support I'm sure everybody has different experiences but in mine the Daw that handles MPE the best is actually bit wig I did manage to get MPE working in FL Studio but it was a little messy for this particular experiment where I'll be loading over a dozen physical modeling synths the good news is is that if you're willing to spend a little bit of time tinkering you can make MPE work with anything where you can customize where midi channels and midi cc is going but please can we just have one standard and stick to it across all instruments Daws and controllers so after a lot of thought and deliberation I've decided to not play you a piece of music and then lie to you and be like oh I recorded this with the group of musicians in 2007 and then M Night shyamal on it and be like that was not recorded music at all that was physical modeling you dumb anyway seriously though guys this is actually kind of a big deal a way bigger deal to me than AI music is because this allows me to write and perform intentful music and express myself while hopefully delivering the sound of an audio recording of live instruments so let's begin thank you so you'll soon understand why I'm writing such a boring sounding song on the piano here so the first time I was commissioned to write or transpose music for players in an orchestra I completely forgot that brass players run out of air bows run out of space open Notes can't vibrate expecting string players to go from a low note to a high note within the same string register immediately is going to result in at least someone missing tune by quite a few cents but now in this case those same limitations will be what makes it sound realistic and these are the things that we miss when we play notes on popular string libraries foreign [Music] foreign [Music] another thing to consider all of these instruments approach notes a little bit differently from one another like a saxophone is way more likely to arrive at a note with a flat or sharp semitone while something like a cello will arrive with a slide you have to consider all these things learn them rehearse them and then perform them foreign foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so I am very satisfied with this test result I'm not satisfied with the song I think it's boring and it makes me feel nothing but I simply can't imagine doing this or getting this result with the standard MIDI controller in a sample Library [Music] foreign [Music] libraries and see what we are comparing this to samples obviously rely on recordings but they often rely on recorded performances and when you're really trying to sound accurate you have to use a lot of key switches with alternate Banks of samples so it doesn't sound redundant for example this solo cello has like a dozen or so different articulation maps for the same note and then there's six different Dynamic layers here and a ton of velocity layers and even then you can still hear the redundancies it's pretty easy to tell that even with a round robin that we're playing the same notes over and over again [Music] if we jumble the velocity around a little bit to get more Dynamic layers to play so rather than being able to perform this expressively like you would an actual musical instrument we have to kind of mask it with these different key switches and then another way of masking it is using Reverb and room emulation and each string has their own sort of body impulse and room that you could put it in and this actually starts getting very CPU intensive but also all of these recordings of different performances creating these massive velocity layers and dynamic layers becomes extremely memory intensive this is running off of a high performance SSD and it still takes forever to load and then all of that running in a clunky container like contact and then a full Orchestra requiring I don't know between like 78 and 100 different musicians so that would be that many different instances of one of these samples I don't know how many computers running content fact you would need to chain together to make that possible but just having to do this for each part it that's hell and so to get that orchestral sound we have this G major foreign [Music] [Music] minimal which at the time was one of the best orchestral sample libraries that I would use for a lot of Television composing and things like that pay attention to how you have to trigger these properly because you can't just go from one note to another so in order to change chords organically you have to kind of get it ready by pressing a chord leaving only one note than getting your other chords set [Music] uh let's go to D major that might be the least emotionally satisfying way to play music in real time and then all of these sequences work very well at 110 BPM but let's move it down to 75 BPM and once you recognize them you cannot unhear them in music and film scores and games they are everywhere you'll get emotionally invested in television show and then bam oh I hear Spitfire Albion one right off the old bat the elephant in the physical modeling room is object which is a newish instrument available exclusively for the reason Daw when you first look at the interface you'll probably be like meh but it's kind of like an FM synth or something you can't really have a super intuitive UI right off the bat like you can have with a subtractive synth or a sampler or something I think that this interface is objectively good I love that you could set a randomization amount just randomize it by twenty percent actually sounds like a [Music] all right let's see how close object can sound to a real instrument this is a breathy sax I think I'll be playing it up in this register so let's say it's a soprano sax foreign [Music] I didn't expect this to be anywhere close to an organ but [Music] [Applause] accordion why not [Music] Christ [Music] [Music] the guitar huh I don't know about that [Music] yeah that's going to be a hard no on that some things are very accurate with this engine some things are very inaccurate with this engine but this engine is really really awesome and I really wish that I could have it as a vst3 plug-in that I could resize and put into my normal workflow that's I'm bummed out about it oh we got it working [Music] I'm just gonna play some on my desk here [Music] foreign I'm not about to make another video in the music production business well I am but not inside this video but you have to think reason has these incredibly fun well-designed and Powerful rack instruments that our gate kept behind a subscription or a 500 initial investment why not just optimize and wrap them for VST and clap plugins and then sell them as Standalone or in a plug-in bundle imageline did this with their instruments for a while and it got people who had no interest in FL Studio to use image lines products there's no polite sounding way to put it I guess I do love an underdog but it's just that these are really great soft synths but not great enough to switch to a Daw that you don't want to use otherwise and definitely not great enough to pay 500 for a software license that you never intend to use but speaking of VST plugins that you could use with any Daw first the obvious choice chromophone 3 from applied acoustic systems and I would say that all things considered this is probably the most accessible physical modeling VST that doesn't mean that it sounds the best that doesn't mean that it's the most powerful that doesn't mean that it has the most accessible UI that doesn't mean that it has the cheapest price but if we were to score all of those things in one big contest I would say that chromophone 3 would probably score the highest so here's our Master interface and then presets and then we have two sound generators per preset and in those sound generators we have two different resonators so this is a drum head [Music] string beam marimba drum head membrane plate closed tube open tube and then finally we have manual which is just a four partial additive synth not the most powerful thing but I would be a lot more excited about it if you could type in the values with decimal points because I feel like that's when you could really get a symbol sound out of an additive synth but this doesn't sound that bad does it [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] and let's hear some presets foreign [Music] I really love this particular preset thank you that's awesome moving on [Music] [Laughter] [Music] physical audio is a company that makes physical modeled VST Instruments and this one is called derailleur and it's it's pretty crazy so we have these resonator bars that are kind of like metallic bars that are simulated and then we have a driver our driver could be a Sawtooth could be a pot string we could change like the pickup position and the pluck position then there's like drive that we put on it add a bode string pitched bar [Music] and then Strikers which I believe are just like noise bursts so what I'm going to do is run a striker into this first resonator here this is already pretty much bat insane but let's look at Bar number two [Music] [Applause] [Music] next up from physical audio we have preparation which as you can see two strings moving around and I move the pickup and pluck area we want to make it a bit more bowed this is one of those things we just want to constantly hit the randomize button wow [Music] in the year 2000 a man named Brian Clevenger started a company called rhizomatic instruments and rhizomatic instruments made a soft synth called absinthe Native Instruments Acquired and eventually destroyed it and for the last 20 years Brian I'm not sure what Brian did for the last 20 years but let's assume that it had something to do with monks and Tibet and relearning how to code softsense as a true VST Master through trials and tribulations and in 2020 he returned from that Monastery with the CD-ROM and on that CD-ROM was plasmonic it cost 150 bucks at the time of me saying this and I would say that it is a lot more powerful than chromophone 3 but not nearly as accurate sounding as chromophone 3. to be completely honest this is not something that would be my first choice to emulate something like a harp or a bell or a marimba or a wind chime but it is a very powerful Contender for sound design or just making crazy pads or crazy sounds using a physical modeling engine [Music] [Music] thank you it's a really inspiring soft synth that makes me want to quit making this video and make music instead which is an amazing thing that's one of the best compliments you could give something but one of the entire Reasons I'm making this video physical modeling in general is such a good place to go if you're just tired of the normal subtractive or FM synth and are looking for some new sounds to get inspired by now I am sure I'm missing something probably missing a lot of things but this video has to come to an end at some point but you know it doesn't have to come to an end the future and do you know what the future has me streaming now I have a streaming Channel and it is found at this address right here and typically I stream every Thursday evening and on that streaming Channel I'm always checking out new physical modeling synths this video has no sponsors and this channel is a non-profit organization and if you find this stuff useful and want to be a member of a community of like-minded folks my patreon is as little as one dollar and it gives you access to all sorts of stuff including a monthly songwriting challenge designed to keep you inspired and evolving and heard as a musician thanks for watching keep creating bye

Channel: Benn Jordan

Views: 222,852

Keywords: music production, science, synthesizers, pro audio, physical modeling, sample libraries, kontakt, pianoteq, reason, plantonic, rhizomatic, absynth, physical modelling, violin, cello, piano, chromaphone, objekt, imagine, expressivee, osmose, ik, physical audio, derailer, preparation, vst, clap, fl studio, bitwig, reason objekt, flstudio, fruity loops, mpe, mode 4, midi, fl studio mpe, simulations, modular, aas, swam, audio modeling, swam strings, tutorial, music making, beat making, scoring, film score

Id: hw9bWnDei-k

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2023