Ethno with a wind controller?

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heyjohn
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Ethno with a wind controller?

Post by heyjohn »

Has anyone tried a MIDI wind controller with the woodwind (and other appropriate) sounds from Ethno?

I'm considering buying it, but I'd like to be able to use Ethno nicely with my Yamaha WX5 controller -- without having to remap all the breath control stuff to velocity, like some keyboard.
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mhschmieder
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Post by mhschmieder »

Although MOTU do not publish a MIDI spec for this product, I feel certain that it does not accept breath control data. The only MIDI control at all is for velocity filtering and/or scaling.

I have a WX5 so can try this later, but would have to wire up too many things at the moment to try it now. There's a dip-switch on the WX5 that you can flip so that it sends expression instead of breath control, and likely Ethno responds to this (although it is annoying that they do not publish a MIDI spec).
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heyjohn
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Post by heyjohn »

Thanks for checking, I'll look forward to knowing for sure.

If there's no MIDI spec, that bodes ill. I'm already hesitant about Ethno due to the hardware dongle -- I once had a program with a hardware dongle, it got to be useless quite quickly. Unknown specs and required acrobatics/compromises would be a deal killer.

I'm familiar with the "send velocity instead" setting on the WX5, but my experience has been that anything that recognizes breath control tends to yield better results. And there are a few VSTi's available -- like KongAudio's -- that recognize breath. Haven't seen a large collection that does, though.

Right now, I don't own any interesting ethno-VSTi's... but hopefully I'll fix that before the end of the year :-)
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Post by mhschmieder »

Lots of good breath-friendly ethnic collections on the market now. I recently picked up the first two volumes of Bela D's "Anthology" series. Both get excellent reviews everywhere. One is "Celtic Winds" and the other is "Spiritual Winds", with more collections on the way (one per year?).

I think you are better off with the Bela D stuff if you're mostly interested in ethnic winds. MOTU Ethno is great bang-for-buck, and there's a strong chance I'll keep it in my collection, but that could change soon as instrument by instrument I am switching to other sources as they get added to my collection. But overall it has a bit more emphasis on percussion instruments (including melodic percussion) than winds and strings. Even so, it has some hard-to-find instruments on board.

One unique feature of MOTU Ethno is that they have separate sample sets for non-western tunings. This could prove very useful, although for me personally not yet, as I am continuing to work within the context of the western scale even when using ethnic instruments (that too could change).
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Post by mhschmieder »

I'm in factory mode this weekend and up against a tight deadline, and only taking a few sanity breaks here and there, so will be focusing strictly on recording and re-tracking through to Tuesday night. As such, I will not have time for even short experiments, but as I also do not know how far along I will get, there is a chance that I may get around to a song that includes an ethnic wind instrument, in which case I will dig out my WX5 and give it a whirl. Don't hold your breath though :-).
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heyjohn
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Post by heyjohn »

Not a problem, I'm not in a hurry, just starting to look around for some interesting new wind sounds.

Many thanks for the recommendations, I'll head off and check 'em out.

Hopefully you'll have some fun time to follow the crunch-time...
heyjohn
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Post by heyjohn »

The Bela D Vol2 stuff does indeed look interesting, but I'm not quite sure what the minimum is to run it. I certainly don't own the full blown version of Kontakt, but I think my copy of Tracktion3-GPO came with a Kontakt Player. Somehow it's not responding to BC correctly (I'm also running a Turbo-VL70m from Patchman, so I can watch its display as well as GPO's).

I guess I just need to find another few blobs of time to check everything out in. :)
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Post by mhschmieder »

Well, I had 26 songs to partially re-track and remix this past week(!), and gave some more attwntion than others due to time, so just didn't get around to hooking up my wind controller, the VL70m, or anything else related.

I was tempted, due to my trouble with getting a reasonably realistic sound out of my sample libraries :-). Now with Wallander Winds on the market (alas, no demo of anything but brass), another PM solution is available which is set up for BC.

Due to how much overlap I have now with Kontakt 3 and other libraries, I was thinking of selling Ethno if there's nothing left in it that is unique, but in tracking sessions this past week I was having better luck with its sounds fitting into a mix than with some other libraries (especially K3), and as it also has the non-western tunings available, I may find that it earns a permanent place in my collection.
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heyjohn
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Post by heyjohn »

Wallander just added some woodwinds to their demo, and they have a pile of sound samples for the winds, too.

I'm not too impressed by some of their sounds -- some of the trumpets were flat-out electronic, and the oboes didn't have enough of a 'reed' sound for my ears. I liked some of the others, though, and might pick up one or two. Not exactly odd instruments like Ethno, but possibly useful nonetheless.

I've only listened to Wallander's sound samples, though, and have yet to play with the real demo. Maybe that'll knock my socks off, who knows? :-)
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Post by mhschmieder »

One of my favourite instruments is the Shehnai, which is distantly related to the Oboe and the Bombarde. I use it a LOT. I haven't checked yet to see if there's one on my VL70m Patchman ROM. I've been using the one in my Yamaha Motif-Rack ES, but now have one in Kontakt 3 that I have not yet tried. I seriously doubt Wallander will add ethnic reeds and brass to his collection, but who knows? Mostly I doubt there's much of a market for it; at least amongst those who can afford it. The world's greatest shenhai player died earlier this year at something like the tender age of 94 :-). I think he was based in South India but the news story came out of Kolkatta.
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heyjohn
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Post by heyjohn »

The only VSTi Shenhai I found was from swarsystems, and it's not part of their demo package. There's also no info on using it with a wind controller.

Patchman has some really great sounds on the turbo VL70m, but I think they could've done more with the ethnic instruments (and less with the guitars and synth ones -- but perhaps that's just my taste). Too many of the ethnic ones are an exercise in reverb, and there is no Shenhai (or Ney, either, which is one of my favorites). But the oboe and english horn are pretty darned good, as are all the brass and sax sounds. I recently did a bit of jazz using the LeadTpt and NYTenor patches, and they sounded great. For the bass and guitars, though, I just played the real thing -- much easier that way 8)

The Patchmanmusic site has a full list of the patches, if your VL70m isn't handy. Plenty of demos, too, for refreshing memory. There were some I'd forgotten about, since I no longer take a tour of the patches when I sit down to play (I'd never get anything done otherwise, there are so many fun ones!)...
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Post by mhschmieder »

To be fair, I think that Matt wanted to keep the VL70m as versatile as with the factory presets, as it is such a pain to load only six custom slots at a time if someone really needed to use it mostly for triggering from a guitar controller. It's easy for us wind players to forget that guitarists are also a major targeted audience for the VL70m.

I kept looking at those Swar Systems plugs, but was never convinced they would be very musical for real-world use. Their main purpose seems to be educational in nature.
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Select Strat, 70th Anniversary Esquire, Johhny Marr Jaguar, 57 LP, Danelectro 12
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Post by heyjohn »

FWIW, I finally went with Kontakt3 -- perhaps not as wide a selection of world instruments, but there's quite a lot of material included with it, and no need for hardware dongles. It'll also let me pursue the BelaD and Garritan packages, should I feel that urge.
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