Keymap HR

Harmonic Resynthesis

One of the main problems you’ll find with sampling, past the initial excitement, is that you often want to build a coherent /cohesive sound out of many different samples but the samples cannot be modified as fluidly as you’d like, and not in the context of an instrument. While you can use the traditional resampling to adjust the pitch of a sound, after that the timing of the sample will also be changed. Or imagine you have two wonderful vibrato flute samples, but the vibrato speeds don’t really match...or you have a piano sample which you think sounds a little too much like a harpsichord and you’d like it to sound more like a grand piano. Sometimes you also have the inverse problem: samples are too similar and you need to differentiate them in order to create a sense of more breath, variety and dynamics.

Previously, applications have allowed you to change some properties of sounds, as pitch and time, but only one sample at a time. Traditionally you have to use time-stretching algorithms and/or plugins to do this destructively for each sample file, and then reassemble the whole instrument and hope that it plays they way you imagined. This approach is inefficient and can kill creativity and experimentation.

Harmonic Resynthesis (HR) is a proprietary technology we have introduced to the field of sampled instruments editors for manipulating pitch, time, formant and amplitude of samples in the context of entire sampler instruments in a simple and intuitive way. The same way movies use computer graphics to create realistic scenes that would be otherwise impossible to shoot, Harmonic Resynthesis works by analyzing your samples, and creating in realtime new sounding samples using the original as a basis.

For maximum flexibility, each Zone has an individual HR engine and set of parameters that you can tweak in realtime. You can also edit multiple Zones at once and immediately hear the results, in the direct context of your instrument.

For each of the four main Harmonic Synthesis sound property parameters, you can directly draw and edit envelopes to achieve the exact result you want. When you change the Time envelope, you will not actually be seeing a change in the length of the sample on screen, but you will see that the playback cursor will smoothly change its speed to follow the envelope. As another example, the amplitude envelope is not a volume-change control, but the real, final, volume of the sample for each point. You are not limited to changing the whole sample length, but you can speed up or down an attack in a subtle way, smooth a vibrato or correct the sample amplitude only where you need it, directly draw the shape of your drum loops on screen, or freeze the decay in a sample, or…. do you get the idea? Harmonic Resynthesis offers an immense range of applications!

Editing of HR envelopes is done either by drawing with the mouse or by using tools that allow you to expand or reduce the effect, grab and smear the envelope, or smoothly reset the envelope to its original shape. While this is extremely flexible, we also added parameters to let you perform common tasks as pitch correction or normalization in realtime through sliders, without having to edit the envelopes directly.

Polyphonation

You can use Harmonic Resynthesis to polyphonate a sample. In other words you can load a sample and build re-synthesized versions of it for the two surrounding octaves. The polyphonated Zones will play for the same exact amount of time, so that you can very easily use this to create harmonies of spoken words, or other similar applications where you are stuck with very few samples and you want intermediate samples too.

While at this point the “Resynthesis” part of “Harmonic Resynthesis” should be clear, we still have to explain the meaning of “Harmonic”. By “Harmonic” we mean that this kind of resynthesis is targeted to sounds with a clearly defined and possibly tuned set of fundamentals and harmonics (also called harmonic sounds). Most acoustic instruments, voices and synth sounds are harmonic sounds. Drums are not harmonic sounds, and neither are drum loops or effected sounds. The amplitude control is an exception to the “harmonic sounds only” rule, as it will also work with inharmonic or non tuned material, and actually will give fantastic results with drum loops as you can directly draw the drums shape.

HR is available in three different algorithms, HR-A , HR-B and HR-C. The “B”: version differs from HR-A in that you can’t change formants, but you have higher quality on complex harmonic audio material. HR-C is for pitch only and is of very high quality. Each algorithm can be selected independently for each Zone.

Logic 8 Integration
Instrument Editor
Group Editors
Setup Editor
Sample Editor
Harmonic Resynthesis
Resources Window
Surround+Space mixer
Batch Creator
Spectral Tuner
Keymap and Kontakt, Structure.

VAT ID IT02120380353