Aug31Written by:Bruce Richardson
Tuesday, August 31, 1999 6:00 PM 
My first thought when introduced to GigaSampler was: why do I need this?
I had become accustomed to manipulating phrase and loop construction in ACID, and had really begun doing all my traditional "sampling tasks" in that environment. Imitative synthesis bores me to tears. Or so I thought.
GigaSampler is valuable for phrase-based sampling, no doubt. You can use giant chunks of audio with no limitations beyond drive space. But that's not what GigaSampler is really about.
Gigasampler is designed from ground up to realistically capture acoustic instruments, notably percussive strings and drums. Not just imitate. Capture. There's a big distinction, and you can hear it from the first note you play. GigaSampler's calling card, after all, is the almighty GigaPiano.
For those of us that grew up on acoustic pianos, the GigaPiano is a landmark electronic instrument. The achilles heel of sampled pianos has always been the "loop and envelope" construction. There's too much going on in a piano to possibly imitate it in this way, hence the universal suckitude of every piano module and sample available. Bury them in the mix with plenty of reverb, and you can get by.
GigaSampler suddenly changes the rules. Here we have the ability to sample each and every string till it dies away, at any number of attack levels. Now do it all over again , this time with pedal, so you hear every overtone of every open string in the piano. Now do it again, and catch the staccato releases of each note. As mapped by Dave Govett, one of Nemesys Music Technology's sampling gurus, the GigaPiano is startling.
I have heard three of the sounds offered by Nemesys; the already infamous GigaPiano, the GigaHarp, and the Larry Seyer Acoustic Bass. I have also heard a single-octave preview of the Concert Organ.
Getting Started
You load everything up, and the first thing you do is load up that piano. Of course you do--you've heard about it everywhere. You tap a few keys, hold down a big fat bass note, and let it decay to nothing. This is the, "Wow, pretty cool," stage of appreciation.
It's only after you stop playing single notes, and start actually playing music with it that you experience your true, "GigaSampler moment," and you begin to realize what's possible with this tool. That piano comes to life under your fingers, and you are completely sucked into the illusion. There's wood, wire, felt, space - and you. You hear the little buzzes and choked overtones of dampers hitting strings when you play staccato. You hear the dull thump of the hammers juxtaposed with the sparkle of the high register - that slightly hollow sound that says, "piano."
Unless you concentrate on a single key, and just pick it to death, you will never hear anything to make you imagine that you're NOT playing a real piano. In a mix, forget about it. It's a piano.
Keep in mind that this is with no reverb, no room simulators, no nothing. Just the bare and beautiful signal. Matter of fact, you'll probably be loathe to put any effects at all on this sound, since the GigaPiano only points out their shortcomings with its stunning realism.
More than Realism
Once you've lost your GigaSampler cherry, you accept the realism without question. It becomes a given that the GigaSampler sounds real. The real kick is that you're now dealing with capturing the essence of a particular instrument (and in many cases, a particular artist playing the particular instrument). The GigaPiano a particular piano - one that you can read about in detail at their site, if you wish.
And in the same way, you can use GigaSampler to model many specific instruments and capture their unique personalities. The Larry Seyer Acoustic Bass is another perfect example. Not only do you have all the standard plucked articulations mapped to your keys, but using controllers, you can pop out harmonics, slides, and muted tones with a tweak of a wheel, slider, or pedal. Slide length can even be mapped to a breath controller.
You end up with not only a realistic sounding, but a realistically playable instrument. It's hard to explain what happens to your playing when you begin to feel the bass's strings muting as you release a key. Suddenly that little extra bit of rhythmic content sells the sound completely. You begin to hear the same rhythm patterns that are generated when an acoustic bass player really starts digging in. It makes you dig in, too, and sure enough, the strings start slapping and rattling a bit, and you hear the body of the bass resonating as flesh meets wire and wood.
It's crazy. No matter how hard I've tried to emulate an acoustic bass with samplers or synths, it's always come out cheese. The sounds didn't really cut the illusion, so instead one had to substitute other instrument-specific techniques like slides, manual vibrato, scoops, etc. Problem is, you had to put in too much of that stuff to keep the listener's mind off the fact that you were triggering only one or two or even eight or ten samples.
Not so with this instrument. The GigaSampler Acoustic Bass, like the GigaPiano, just suckers you completely. There are simply so many samples, captured and mapped so well, that the illusion of reality is actually moot. It sounds real, but that's only the beginning. It's a deeper emulation than that. It has a personality - that of a beautiful instrument and of a skilled player, all awaiting your command.
Hearing the Nemesys library sounds really got me going. I figured, what the hell? I can do this if these guys can. I certainly have the ear for it. After going at the Patch Editor supplied with GigaSampler for a couple of days, I had mapped a few existing wave files, and made some boring spacy-sounding stuff. This was all very ho-hum, and I started losing interest again. This much, I could do in ACID, only ten times as fast. I had not yet attempted to "capture" an instrument.
The Big Moment
So I decided to map a drum, a very nice djembe that I own. First, I got a good sound going by just playing, recording, and moving mics. Then I went to work, playing every stroke fifty or sixty times at varying intensities, letting every overtone ring to silence. Next, I used Vegas to edit and select the best sixty some-odd samples. After organizing and naming all these, I used the patch editor to build a GIG file.
A little info to illustrate the process: There are three basic Djembe strokes: bass, tone, and slap (the official "names" for those strokes are Gun-Dun for bass, Go-Do for tones, and Pa-Ka for the slaps, the double names being assigned one per hand--if Gun is right hand, then Dun is left hand, etc.).
My recorded tones and slaps were mapped together to two separate regions, so I could have a "right hand" and a "left hand" sample set. The bass tones were mapped to two additional regions and randomized in the same fashion. Then I mapped the instrument to six consecutive white keys--so that tones/slaps were located to the left and right, and bass in the middle, mimicking the hand placement for these tones on the drum itself. This is one instrument that plays just as nicely from a keyboard as a pad set, since pads tend to be more suited to stick use.
When I finally finished that drum, and actually started to play it, I had my Really Big GigaSampler Moment. This was not just any drum being played on a keyboard, it was MY drum, and what I was playing on the keyboard sounded for all the world like ME playing it. Furthermore, by knowing how the tones were produced on the drum, coupled with GigaSampler's flexibility of mapping, I had created something that not only sounded amazing, but was playable with a technique that approximated the instrument itself. This reinforces the illusion even more by forcing appropriate hand patterns to the equation. I mapped a bunch of other percussion odds and ends, and eventually ended up with this sort of goofy outer space pygmy drum circle thing happening. Suffice to say, I had fun and ended up with a fantastic instrument that I had built from scratch.
Several drummer friends of mine have been over since I started this evaluation. I have loaded up my "GigaDjembe" for every one, and showed them which keys to play, saying nothing else except, "check this out."
Every one of them reacted the same way. They started tapping keys, smiled, then started actually playing. Then they stopped playing, and started laughing. They, too, have had their Gigasampler moment.
A Few Words with Francis Preve
Director of Marketing, Nemesys | 
Francis Preve |
There are as many ways to use soft-synthesizers as there are musicians, but every tool I have used seems uniquely targeted towards a particular use, whether this is intentional or simply an organic outgrowth of the product design itself. Where do you see GigaSampler fitting into the overall market?
GigaSampler is targeted at the sampler user who's already maxed-out his RAM and needs more space for instruments, as well as ultra-fast loading times. Try loading a 128MB instrument from a CDROM into a hardware sampler, and you'll quickly get the point.
While we've seen a massive growth in sales in the past year overall, we're getting a lot of interest from the soundtrack and neo-classical areas, simply because no other sampling product can support the sheer depth and complexity that our acoustic instruments provide. Composers at Fox, Sci-Fi Channel, UPN, and the USA Network are currently using GigaSampler on a daily basis, so there's a good chance that you may have already heard GigaSampler without knowing it!
What's the most surprising thing you've heard of someone doing with GigaSampler?
Since our defacto single-sample limitation is 4GB(!), we've seen a number of planetariums and even amusement parks use GigaSampler to add dialogue and sound effects to attractions and rides. Several have actually replaced racks of hardware samplers with one or two GigaSamplers.
Sometimes, especially early-on with new technology like soft-synths, musicians want to know, "What's next, and when?" Especially as it concerns issues that affect the stability and usability of a given synth over the long haul. Where is Nemesys going with Gigasampler 2.0, and what's coming over the horizon?
We don't discuss unannounced product specs, but a lot of interesting "hearsay and speculation" can be found at the Northern Sounds GigaSampler Users Group.http://www.northernsounds.com/cgibin/Ultimate.cgi?action=intro It's also worth noting that we have a "Wish List" email address, mailto:wishlist@nemesysmusic.com, that our developers read daily. It's one of the ways we stay in touch with what our customers really want.
If you could make one thing about Gigasampler better by snapping your fingers, what would it be?
Actually, the issue we'd most like to address is continued proliferation of our ultra-low latency GigaSampler Interface (GSIF). There are some incredible new products available from Soundscape (Mixtreme), Frontier Design Group (Dakota), Echo (Layla/Gina/Darla), Ego and Aardvark -- as well as most DirectSound compatible cards. Still, we'd like to see other soundcard manufacturers bring their GSIF compatible soundcards to market this year. It's super-easy to implement this compatibility, and we're giving the interface spec away for free to hardware manufacturers. If your readers want to see GSIF integrated in a wider variety of products, they should contact their manufacturers directly
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Now, you can absolutely kill your polyphony with this kind of programming. With full decays, release triggers, and other reality-inducing tricks, you can eat 64 voices in a single flurry of notes. GigaSampler is very crafty at stealing voices, but still, 64 voices is 64 voices. When you start losing the long decays, you'll hear artifacts in certain situations.
So you have to be smart about programming, and keep your head about what is important musical information, and what is less critical. Rest assured that this is on a completely different plane of thinking from the techniques required by RAM samplers, though. By the time you start to have this problem, you'll be so far ahead that the solutions are all quite palatable. Program carefully, and when you start to hit your polyphony, RAM, or CPU ceilings, simply render the files to disk-based tracks and start over. If you save your performances (the term for your loaded sample-set and its MIDI configuration) carefully, you can always go back to make changes and re-render.
It's an undeniable fact: GigaSampler is a "gotta have it" tool. The uses are endless. Any task that would send you reaching for your sampler simply becomes easier and faster on GigaSampler. The "capturing" of acoustic instruments is beyond anything you've ever heard. You can forget about those time limits on phrase sampling--whatever you need, you can have with GigaSampler, without regard to RAM limitations.
How Real is Real?
So will GigaSampler make your MIDI recordings sound like acoustic players? Can you fool the golden ears?
Maybe. The other side of the equation, of course, is the player's and programmer's experience. GigaSampler delivers the tools, but it's up to the performer to know what to do with the sounds. Start playing "impossible" stuff using even the best-programmed acoustic sounds, and the illusion is blown as quickly as it came to life. This is the slippery slope of all imitative synthesis: if you're going to use these amazing emulations, then you need to be a good "actor" of a musician and know how to play the part of a bass player, or piano player, or whatever.
Full time studio rats are already thinking this way - after all, there are good players everywhere, but studio players are the special breed that can instantly bring an idea to life. If you've done your homework, GigaSampler gives you everything you need to pull off an authentic performance, on a virtual instrument, that can absolutely hang with the real thing.
And beyond the purely imitative lie possibilities in sampling that are limitless, compared to the various restrictions imposed by hardware-based samplers. Design sounds all day in Reaktor, for instance, then load them up as performances in Gigasampler
So, if you've been thinking about purchasing a new sampler for your studio, forget about hardware sampling. It's all but dead. GigaSampler is the way to go.
Get more information at http://www.nemesysmusic.com
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