Virtual Stone
Kontakt/Granite: April to June 2017.
My music making practice has a back ground in sampling and digital technology. By making a virtual sound stone, this enabled me to utilise and manipulate its sounds without being tied to the physical object. As previously stated, the logistics of playing and recording a sound stone are difficult. I have had some previous experience in making Kontakt sampled instruments, in the past I have made a toy piano and a four stringed zither. This was a much more complicated process as the sound of the stone evolves on many different levels. From the initial finger rubbing to the eventual sonic vibrations, it passes through numerous physical bodies including the player, the wooden resonator box, the stone lamellas and the rooms itself. This is one of the central tenets of Hannes Fessmann's sound stone theory, that the physical space in which the stone inhabits also becomes an important part of the auditory experience.
"The oscillating body of matter propagates sound differently depending on its location and the attachment to the room. The spatial relation of human and resonating bodies determines the quality of the experience." Hannes Fessmann: 2017
The Kontakt Stone: In terms of creating a usable sampled stone, the most important part of the whole process was to get a good, clean, close, recording. Once this has been captured the samples could then be treated and effected. Firstly, I had to decide on a universal tempo and set this as a metronome for Hannes to play along too. In my initial sound tests I had experimented with a variety of different tempi. After some experimentation we decided on a tempo of 85bpm. In order to get the expression I needed to achieve the realism of a performance, each lamella had to be recorded in isolation. I meticulously captured Hannes playing each lamella over the duration of three takes, using his fingertips and palms along the top and sides of the stone.
lamella 1: Take 1
It took over eight hours to set up, sound check and record all thirteen lamellas. Once this process was completed, I transferred the recordings into Cubase.
Microphone One: had been placed directly above the project stone at around sixty inches. It captured a very clean and clear recording and didn't need too much work. Unfortunately, using ribbon mics in a soundproof room will always create extra noise and hiss. This can be easily removed in post-production and doesn't pose a significant problem. I made some frequency reductions between 10k and 20k to remove the hiss and made another slight reduction at 5k. At 500 Hz I reduced the mid range, leaving everything else flat.
Trossingen recording session in Cubase
Before I could build the sampled stone in Kontakt, I had to first, balance and mix the five separate microphones in order to make one master track.
Microphone one (facing): frequency reductions
Microphone Two: was the AKG, C411 contact mic, which had been fixed to the inside of the wooden resonator box. I was only interested in the low end frequencies of this mic and made frequency reductions at 500Hz, cutting out everything above.
Microphone One (facing): dry and with eq
Microphone Two (contact): frequency
Microphone Two (contact): dry and with eq
Microphones Three & Four: were placed to
the left and right of the stone. These captured
all the nuances and finer details that I had felt were missing in other sound stone recordings. This was a very detailed recording but exhibited some large frequency peaks between 2k and 10k. These peaks had to be reduced, their comparative volumes balanced and finally, panned left and right.
reductions
Microphone Four (right): frequency reductions
Microphone five: I had used a small sound -proof studio because I wanted to capture a really clean, close sound. Unfortunately, the down side to this kind of room is a lack of reverb and reflections. I placed this mic in the opposite direction to the project stone which captured a slightly different sound to the others. This was really useful when it came to
balancing all the other recordings together.
Microphone Three (left): frequency reductions
Microphones three & Four (left & right): dry with eq
Microphone Five (room): frequency reductions
Once the master track was compiled, I mixed down all the takes and chose a number of loops from each lamella to import into Kontakt. From these samples I created eleven key groups which gave me a four octave range from C1 to C5. In the wave editor I activated the grid and looped all the samples adjusting the start points. (This process can be referenced in much further detail in the Kontakt 5 user manual). Jan Morgenstern, Adam Hanley. Kontakt 5. https://www.native-instruments.com/fileadmin/
ni_media/downloads/manuals/KONTAKT_5_6_8_Manual_English.pdf
Microphone Five (room): with and without eq
Key groups and wave editor in Kontakt
The effects chain was created in Cubase as I find Kontakt’s internal effects unnecessarily complex.. I started with the Steinberg “reverence” reverb plugin, using a large church reflection to create a really smooth, warm sound. I set the mix at sixty percent which enabled me to keep all the details of the stone playing whilst adding some large room reflections.
Kontakt stone: with and without reverb
I added a limiter on the master bus with a high threshold to dip the loudest notes and widened the stereo field with the Waves S1, stereo enhancer plugin.
Steinberg Limiter
Waves S1
Playing the Kontakt stone was not as intuitive as I had hoped. It felt more like an exercise in triggering samples than playing an instrument that used samples. Playing the lamellas on top of each other produced some really interesting textures which had shades of György Ligeti’s Atmospheres and Lux Aeterna, but lacked the magic of a real sound stone performance. It was at this point I realised the sound I was actually trying to find was within the transitions between the notes; the sound you get when one lamella unfolds into the next. My rigid loops within kontakt were not going to allow me to create such an effect. I had to go away and reconsider my whole approach towards making the virtual sound stone.
Kontakt Sound Stone: composition
After a lot of research, playing and editing my samples, I came to the conclusion that I needed a programme that would allow me to move through a long sample, changing its loop points in real time. This would allow me to use a sound stone recording and extend
the transitions between the lamellas. I was aware of GRM's Freeze plugin, which lets you freeze a fragment of a sound, scrub through it and make loops of different sizes and
pitches, all in real time. The only problem with this plug-in is the size of the samples you can use effectively. Whilst it is good for small samples it does not work very well for sound files over five seconds because the plug-ins buffer can only load very small amounts of audio. However, this was a great starting point to find something similar that could manipulate larger pieces of audio. I read a number of music production blogs searching out articles and discussions on new sampling software. After a few days, I came across a forum on KVR discussing a granular sampler called Granite, made by New Sonic Arts.
"Granite is a granular sampler particularly capable at generating evolving, organic textures, atmospheres and soundscapes. Granite offers a vast range of transformation possibilities and can generate a wide range of sounds and extensively processed loops. Featuring a compact and intuitive interface and an engaging workflow including innovative Motion Recorders recorders and Cycle Modulators, Granite can operate as a free-running sound generator, or as a playable MIDI instrument. Virtually all parameters can be controlled via MIDI CC and host automation". www.kvraudio.com
I downloaded the demo version of Granite and imported my sound stone recordings. Within seconds, I was looping and manipulating the transitions between the lamellas, creating huge swirling, atmospheric soundscapes in "real time". This was an absolute revelation, not only did this plugin allow me to extend and manipulate my recordings, it also gave me the ability to play octave variations using a midi keyboard.
Over the next two months I experimented with a number of different effects and parameters, samples and recordings, until I had finally worked out my best practice.
For playing live with the Granite plugin, I start with a selection of live recordings edited together to include all the transitions with five seconds of audio either side. This allows me to create loop-points just before and after the transitions and slowly move through them using my modulation wheel to control the starting points of each. One of the huge benefits for using Granite as a performance tool is its ability to play multiple MIDI notes simultaneously whilst looping a section This gives you the ability to add notes and frequencies that don't exist within a real sound stone performance.
A Lengthy Introduction to New Sonic Art's Granite Synth: Video Source: www.youtube.com/user/Dan Reynolds Audio
Studio session: Hannes playing
Granite: Sound Stone: Composition