Do the bagpipe drones work? Are these chanter-only samples?

[mhschmieder]

Has anyone tried the celtic pipes yet? They don't seem to work properly. Maybe there's another section of the manual I need to read for setting up instruments to be non-monophonic?

The problem seems to go deeper than that though. Maybe I've just gotten used to ready-to-go programmed voice libraries dedicated to one instrument.

I tried re-tracking an early demo of a celtic piece I was working on a couple of years back which was originally recorded using Bolder Sounds' Celtic Pipes sample library running on a Yamaha Motif ES workstation. The voice library is set up very well to take advantage of real world playing styles.

A typical bag pipe has a chanter with up to three drones. Even after splitting the MIDI up into two separate files -- one for the chanter, and one for the drone -- I cannot get any notes low enough to serve as a true drone, no matter which sound source I choose from Ethno's selection of celtic pipes.

Furthermore, it is never possible to sound more than one note at a time, so I can't get octave-unison drones going. And I have to transpose those parts to sound at all, based on the published range for each pipe in the Ethno library. In each case, this puts it too high to be a drone.

Am I missing something? Are the drones labeled differently and categorised somewhere else in the library? The description in the manual would lead me to believe these samples could be played polyphonically to create the chanter atop the multiple drones, so long as one obeyed proper articulation and note ranges.

At this point, I think I have concluded I am best off re-buying the Celtic Pipes library from Bolder Sounds for Kontakt 2, which is on special cross-grade right now for under $20. It's a small investment anyway, but I don't like clutter and try to keep my system free of redundancies or stuff I'm just not going to use (such as the entire freebie library that ships with Kontakt 2 ).

[mhschmieder]

Looking at Anthology: Celtic Winds from Bela D Music, their bagpipe drone is mapped exclusively to A#1. So perhaps the MOTU Ethno drone is similarly limited vs. encompassing some of the more advanced bag pipe designs.

I really wish MOTU would more deeply specify their instruments in Ethno (I made similar comments earlier regarding rhe latin percussion). Time is money, and I just don't have time to go into an exploratory mode (which I characterise as debugging ), for every instrument, where more thorough documentation would have answered a lot of questions more quickly and more precisely.

Anyway, for that reason, I do not plan to use Ethno for celtic instruments at this point in time, even though the actual samples are very detailed and crisp. Maybe if I have free time later on when I feel I can explore deeper. For now, it is more expedient for me to use the Bolder Sounds library, even though its resolution is grainier due to being targeted originally for the Yamaha Motif workstation.

The Anthology series now has a second volume called "Spiritual Winds". It covers a strange collection with no clear focus or geographic destination, but the audio demo is very nice. I think this new series from Bela D will serve as a nice complement to MOTU Ethno as time goes on and they extend their library. It seems they are focusing on wind instruments right now, and all are set up to work well with a Yamaha WX5 wind controller.

[shang]

This was a real bummer when I started looking into it. I had purchased Ethno because I was going to be doing an album that needed ethno type stuff, and Bagpipes was one of the main instruments. No drones! I found something in the loops that may have come out of a bagpipe but it sounds more like a sick duck than anything I've heard from a bagpipe.

And now to top it off, I can't get the plugin to work in Sonar 6 PE. Others on here are having similar issues.

Does anyone have any suggestions for really good, realistic, but usable bagpipes? Is the Celtic Winds from Bela D the best thing out there?

[mhschmieder]

I haven't installed BellaD's Celtic Winds yet, but plan to do so later this week (my new 750 GB hard drive just arrived, so now I have room for my more recent sample library purchases). I also have some pipes/drones from RARE, which I have not yet loaded/tried.

It may be that the drones are there in Ethno but require a CC or a specific note (not necessarily the note that sounds) to trigger it. I haven't had time to revisit this for the third time yet to see if I was just stupid.

[shadoe42]

This is the sort of thing that should be in the manual or at least in the online help. I have recently had to rebuild my system and the only thing I have yet to reinstall is Ethno. Because it takes to long to determine what is where and when that I don't really use it much.

[mhschmieder]

Well, that's only true for certain instruments. I use Ethno a lot, but keep augmenting it with specialised libraries from PrecisionAudio and others.

I thought I might be able to eventually part with it, but it seems it has quite a few rare instruments that just aren't covered elsewhere.

It isn't always my go-to first choice and is uneven in quality, so I plan to make a chart soon so I don't waste so much time. I hate having to set up a USB controller just to quickly audition its sounds and find which notes do what in the congas, etc. A built-in MIDI keyboard would help for auditioning.

I did some direct comparisons this weekend vs. some of the website samples of PrecisionSound's libraries (they have a 30% off sale that ends Friday). In most cases the PrecisionSound samples seemed more natural and expressive (they have taken pains to cover more of the articulations and natural playing styles of each instrument).

What is surprising though, is that MOTU did not give equal treatment to each instrument in Ethno. Some are given way more space than others. Not wanting to spend a bundle, I was very conservative in my use of the PrecisionSound discount this week, focusing specifically on instruments that I am using in current projects vs. unfinished/legacy/future projects.

As I have said many times before, the product is worth what it costs. And at its low price, it only takes a few high quality instruments to earn its keep, even if there are better sources for many of the others.

I posted a question on the Mach Five forum about the ethnic library in Version 2, but no one answered. I remain curious whether it is different, a subset, a superset, or an intersection set of what is in Ethno.

I'll be on vacation for a few weeks so won't have a chance to compare other bagpipe sources until mid-September or later. As I have a current project that uses them, re-tracking that project is on my second tier priority list, so I will still try to remember to post an update here if I find one of my other sources to be better quality and more usable for drones.