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1 <html>
2 <head>
3 <meta name="author" content="Christian Schoenebeck">
4 <title>Instrument Scripts</title>
5 <meta name="description" content="Introduction to real-time instrument scripts.">
6 </head>
7 <body>
8 <h1>Real-Time Instrument Scripts</h1>
9 <p>
10 The sampler technology is constantly evolving to satisfy new feature
11 requirements of sound designer in order to allow them creating more and
12 more realistic sounds. As an example you might look at state of the art
13 orchestra libraries. They not only allow you pick one of the individual
14 instrument sounds of an orchestra, they also allow you to control the
15 articulation of the respective orchestra instrument while playing them
16 live with your keyboard. So you might start playing an interesting intro
17 with a string ensemble in
18 <i title="Technique that uses a bowing style that leaves the string clearly to produce a light 'bouncing' sound.">spiccato</i>
19 playing style, then you might go over into a slow bridge part where the
20 string ensemble is resembling a
21 <i title="Of successive notes in performance, connected without any intervening silence of articulation.">legato</i>
22 articulation or even
23 <i title="Portamento is a continous pitch sliding from one note to another.">portamento</i>
24 in between, which makes that part of the song very calm and
25 relaxed, and then you shock your audience all of a sudden with a loud
26 <i title="Staccato signifies a note of shortened duration, separated from the note that may follow by silence.">staccato</i>,
27 automatically supported by kettledrum and brass sounds, that wakes up even
28 the last one in the back row. And the best thing: you did not switch to
29 another instrument during that entire song.
30 </p>
31
32 <h3>Technical Challenge</h3>
33 <p>
34 Adding these kinds of features to a sampler had long been a challenge for
35 software developers. On one hand you need to provide the musician
36 additional controls to let him switch between such kind of orchestra
37 articulations. Sound designers came up with various ideas to let the
38 keyboard player do this. For example by
39 <ul>
40 <li>using continous controllers like the keyboard's modulation wheel</li>
41 <li>using a dedicated keys section on the keyboard where each key selects another playing style</li>
42 <li>utilizing aftertouch support of keyboards</li>
43 </ul>
44 and some more. And on the other hand developers needed to extend the
45 sampler software and the instrument file format to deal with all those
46 extensions. Thinking about <i>portamento</i> for example, the sampler not
47 only has to pick the right sample for the first key the keyboard player
48 hits, the sampler also has to detect the next note and needs to pick a
49 special dedicated portamento sample that goes specifically from that one
50 note to that other note. If the sampler would do that synthetically
51 instead, then it would sound synthetically.
52 </p>
53 <p>
54 And if that was not enough, sound designers started even to ask for very
55 exotic features, specifically for just a bunch of sounds or even for just
56 one single sound of
57 theirs, for example
58 a specific note pattern that shall automatically be added by the sampler
59 to each note being played by the keyboard player.
60 The requested feature set became such large, that sampler developers
61 failed to put all this into their stock sampler software package.
62 A completely new solution was required.
63 </p>
64
65 <h3>Scripts as Solution</h3>
66 <p>
67 Instead of bloating the sampler engine with more and more suboptimal
68 features that not really suited anybody, the sampler developers turned the
69 way around and opened the sampler engine for sound designers, so that they
70 could add their own custom software components and bundle them with their
71 sounds. These kinds of software plugins that are directly glued and
72 shipped with sounds are called <i>Instrument Scripts</i>, they extend
73 the sampler software with new software features required by the
74 respective sound.
75 </p>
76 <p>
77 Sound designers were finally free to add their own features to the sampler
78 and used <i>Instrument Scripts</i> extensively to create stunning new
79 sounds. For example they came up with a feature called
80 <i title="Sympathetic resonance is a harmonic phenomenon wherein a formerly passive string responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness.">
81 symphatetic resonance
82 </i> for their piano sound libraries, which brought piano sounds another
83 great leap forward to match their real, physical counter parts.
84 </p>
85
86 <h2>Using Scripts with LinuxSampler</h2>
87 <p>
88 LinuxSampler allows you to write and use such <i>Instrument Scripts</i>
89 as well. At this point however, support for instrument scripts is limited
90 to the GigaStudio format engine of LinuxSampler yet. The script engine was
91 developed in a very modular design, where most of the script engine's
92 software is independent from the actual sampler format and the
93 respective sampler format engine is just adding its format specific
94 extensions to the script language. For example the GigaStudio format
95 engine adds scripting functions to allow the sound designer to control the
96 dimension region by scripts.
97 </p>
98 <p>
99 In other words: adding script support to the SFZ format engine for
100 example would not be much work. Simply nobody so far had time and
101 passion to add the scripting feature to the SFZ engine yet.
102 </p>
103
104 <h3>Bundling Scripts with Sounds</h3>
105 <p>
106 Our graphical instrument editor for the GigaStudio format - <i>gigedit</i> -
107 includes an instrument script editor and allows you to attach
108 instrument scripts to individual GigaStudio format sounds. Refer to the
109 gigedit manual for <a href="gigedit_scripts.html">how to manage instrument scripts with gigedit.</a>
110 </p>
111
112 <h3>Learning the Script Language</h3>
113 <p>
114 You certainly find some instrument scripts ready to be used on the
115 Internet. So you can simply download and attach them to your sounds with
116 <i>gigedit</i>. In order to write your own custom instrument scripts though, you
117 need to get in touch with the scripting language. Refer to the
118 <a href="nksp.html">NKSP Language Tour</a>
119 for learning how to write your own scripts.
120 </p>
121
122 <h3>Script Language Reference</h3>
123 <p>
124 If you are already familiar with the instrument script language basics,
125 and just need details and examples to the individual built-in functions
126 and built-in variables, then refer to the
127 <a href="nksp_reference.html">NKSP Reference Manual</a>.
128 </p>
129
130 </body>
131 </html>

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