That's interesting, Steven. 

I developed a similar way of working myself some time ago... I have written a sort of standard orchestra that has a global mixer with busses for a very high quality reverb, a chorus, and a compressor. Each instrument can be individually sent to any or all of these busses. 

I too noticed that the sound of the instruments was often much improved with high-quality reverb -- not necessarily a lot of reverb.

For similar reasons I often use instruments that have internal delay lines, which do some of the same things as reverb. I adapted this idea (and some of the instruments) from Joseph T. Kung's xanadu.csd.

But it's easy to overdo this stuff and end up with sonic mush!

Somebody should probably implement a high quality convolution reverb... it could be used for other stuff as well...

I agree and disagree about commercial synthesizers. I also look at them and try to learn from them. But I would say that, although the average commercial patch is better than the average Csound patch, the best Csound patches sound somewhat better to me than the best commercial patches. I don't know why that should be, since presumably the same things are happening under the hood... perhaps the commercial stuff is too concerned with running fast. Or perhaps the Csound patches have just been tweaked more.


Best,
Mike

-----Original Message-----
>From: Steven Yi 
>Sent: Mar 6, 2008 2:47 PM
>To: csound@lists.bath.ac.uk
>Subject: [Csnd] Re: Newbie in need of instruments
>
>Hi Panos,
>
>Regarding instruments, I am of the mindset to create very complex
>instruments with a large number of parameters, giving a wider area of
>sound space to explore.  Some thoughts about this and how things are
>concieved in blue are here:
>
>http://csounds.com/stevenyi/blue/usermanual/html/blueSynthBuilder.html
>
>One thing I find valuable is studying commercial synthesizers, both
>hardware and software.  I will time to time look at hardware synth
>manuals and create similar instruments in Csound.  Often one finds
>there are a LOT of parameters in commercial synthesizers, something I
>don't regularly see in many Csound instruments due to the difficulty
>of quickly understanding the values of parameters and the boundaries
>of those parameters.  Those kinds of things are very easy to see using
>GUI's, as mentioned in the manual entry link above.
>
>I do also like the flexibility to create a very simple but very
>specific instrument when a piece seems to require it, though most of
>the time now I use the library of instruments created in blue by both
>myself and others which they contributed to blueShare.  I also do
>notice that the quality of sound from most commercial synthesizers
>relies a great deal on the effects used with it.  Many synthesizers
>will have always on effects like chorus, delay, etc. which can not be
>done within the same instrument in Csound.  That can easily be done by
>routing instrument sound into an always-on mixer instrument that
>applies effects (this is what blue encapsulates with its mixer and
>effects system).  I found it very interested to try out demos of
>commercial instruments and turning anything that would be an always-on
>effect like chorus and reverb to hear what is really the core sound of
>the instrument.  I've found that the a lot will come from effects, so
>that is something to be think about when crafting an instrumental
>sound.
>
>Well, hope that's useful!
>steven
>
>
>
>
>
>On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 12:49 AM, Panos Katergiathis  wrote:
>> Hello all
>>
>>  I am a spoiled ex-(windows-asio-cubase-vst) user that had (until now)
>>  too many "instruments" to play with. I have come to understand that this
>>  "wealth" of options has nothing to do with creating music itself, and i
>>  am willing to limit my instrument choices to a minimum. Still, since i
>>  am not-much-of-an-expert in csound (yet, that is), i am currently
>>  limited to very simple instruments that (yes) they keep me interested
>>  but not excited at all.
>>
>>  Of course, i have purchased the "csound catalog" that actually contains
>>  some nice instruments (along with some others, not so nice), however i
>>  wouldn't know if these instruments represent the cream of what one can
>>  do with csound or if they are "mediocre" by today's standards. Surely, i
>>  have listened to some extremely exciting instruments in the (long gone?)
>>  csound radio page - nothing in the catalog comes close.
>>
>>  So, the question is forged: what is the easiest and what is the best
>>  approach for creating csound instruments? Please share your experience.
>>
>>  Regards
>>
>>  Panos
>>
>>
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>
>
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