Piano Crown, my first SFZ

Link to good samples/soundfonts at http://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/free_audio_data

Moderators: MattKingUSA, khz

Post Reply
User avatar
kbongosmusic
Established Member
Posts: 109
Joined: Sun Mar 06, 2016 9:14 pm
Location: Minneapolis

Piano Crown, my first SFZ

Post by kbongosmusic »

Here's my first attempt at SFZ, an old 'Crown' Piano(built in Chicago, maybe 1940? would be my guess, large concert size upright). From mono 16bit wav recordings I did 10 years ago, played with making sf2 files out of em back then.

* http://kbongos.com/sfz/PianoCrown_v4.tgz - (7MB).

The piano I tuned myself, so it's not tuned real well, I'm not sure how good or useful it is to anyone else. Consider it a honky tonk ;) but I figured I'd share the experience of making a sfz file with everyone. Really enjoyed the simplicity of it compared to trying to use swami years ago. re-cut the notes out of the raw wave files(audacity), produced named single note wave files(about 3-4 notes per octave). Ended up using names like 60_c4_pb.wav, where 60 is the midi note, c4 is middle C, and pb is a reference to original raw wave file 'b'(I made three recordings of numerous notes).

The sfz file I just used some of jeffg's as a reference and kept it simple, all you need is a text editor.

I kinda transitioned from using names c4, a4, etc to putting the midi note in front so it would sort nicer, plus I like the option of using the midi note number reference in the sfz file instead of the note name like c4 mainly because it made it more straight forward to set the keylo, keyhi values without having to think so much(let's see a4 is above c4, etc).

At some point I made a python script to push and rename these files around, double check that they exist, etc. The cut work with audacity wasn't too bad but at some point I wish I could automate it some. Took a quick look at this Shuriken beat slicer. Seems to overlap somewhat with the process of trying to cut out notes. An interesting and neat app by the way. It would be cool if a gui editor would allow me to just mark cut points and then auto slice them into independent wave files. Shuriken wasn't real happy with some of the noise. sox I was surprised can't do that(like cut -from:start-point -to:end-spot), ffmpeg can, but I am not sure how good the resolution would be. And then I started thinking that a scripted conversion and generation of sfz files could be pretty neat. Like jeffg;s little lizzard piano based on the huge Salamander one, generating a modified one from the original wav files could have certain advantages - you could offer to generate various sizes, mono, stereo, 44khz, 48khz, run effects on the waves, etc. All from the original wav files.

I want to try something more avant-garde next, like make a sfz out of the human voice, a humm sound perhaps..
The original raw wavs are in a _v2.tgz file (27MB) if anyone was interested in experimenting.
Post Reply