I have the "Cooking with Csound" book and have studied it and played around with the instrument definitions.

The instruments are extremely good. However, they do not suit my personal compositional requirements. Their horn has the same range as the actual horn; for my horn, I want an extended range in both pitch and dynamics that, within the range of the real horn, sounds like the real horn.

Similarly, their instruments are based on evolving very basic approaches -- waveshaped wavetable synthesis, or FM synthesis -- with very closely calculated tweaking of a fairly large number of parameters. This approach produces truly excellent results that also are efficient to compute. Unfortunately, I at any rate do not find it obvious how to tweak an instrument definition further to get a different sort of sound. 

For that reason I prefer instruments with fewer parameters, or physical models.

Their approach does convincingly demonstrate that without a lot of horsepower, you can get extremely convincing emulations out of Csound using simple methods of direct synthesis. It proves there is still a lot of mileage left in this decades old approach.

Regards,
Mike

-----Original Message-----
>From: Anthony Kozar 
>Sent: Jan 25, 2008 12:23 AM
>To: "csound@lists.bath.ac.uk" 
>Subject: [Csnd] Re: Re: Re:  The 'big picture' of Tim M's question--was: 'phase-synced crossfading, etc.'
>
>aaron@akjmusic.com wrote on 1/24/08 7:41 PM:
>
>> Quoting Anthony Kozar :
>
>>> Have you tried any of the Csound physical models that are floating around
>>> out there?
>> 
>> Yes, and ditto, I'd love to see who has put enough faith in them to
>> work with them in a large scale musical context...the most impressive
>> quasi-realistic acoustic instrument work I've seen is still mostly
>> sample-based to my knowledge. what you say about transients is true,
>> so I should correct myself--multisamples. Obviously, using one sample
>> for the range of an entire keyboard does not give anything close to
>> realism, although some of the sounds might have interesting
>> characteristics in their own right.
>
>I was assuming multiple samples for pitch but not necessarily dynamics and
>articulation.  One of the best examples of physical modeling work that I
>have heard so far that was done with Csound, is a nice imitation of a
>trombone in some compositional sketches that Michael Mossey wrote.
>
>> The Horner/Ayers 'horn chapter' has the best sounding example in the
>> whole 'CSound Book' (the Strauss "Eulenspiegel" excerpt) if you ask
>> me...musical, warm, and not jarring in the least. And nice realism to
>> boot.
>
>They have written an entire book that expands on that work, I believe.  (I
>have never read it).  "Cooking with Csound, Part 1"
>
>Anthony Kozar
>mailing-lists-1001 AT anthonykozar DOT net
>http://anthonykozar.net/
>
>
>
>
>
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