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Modern
Songwriter
Producer’s Notes & Tips:
This library covers so much ground that it almost acts the same
role as one of your sound modules. It’s full of those "staple"
sounds if you are a producer/songwriter or a live keyboardist in
a Pop or R&B act. These are also sounds that can be used together
in a sequence to build up an entire song without having to change
discs. In fact, there is so much variety on this disc that you could
swap piano sounds, pads and drum kits very quickly, which is a great
benefit when you are in that "creative" mode. So, for
the pro musician this disc is definitely a handy tool. But for the
beginner sampler user it’s even more powerful. The years of
sampling it took to be able to offer this many sounds, like string
orchestras, concert grands, guitars, keyboards, drum sessions and
vocal choirs, make this collection that much more valuable to someone
who just got a new sampler. It would be a monumental undertaking
to gather, sample, edit and program all of these instruments yourself
and Modern Songwriter is a great way to get started in building
your own sample library collection.
Modern Songwriter also offers a few unique features that are useful
performance tools for creating songs. One of these features is the
"Strum Guitars." These virtual rhythm guitars can be strummed
in any key and any tempo with a wide variety of chords. The way
it works is simple. On this collection you have an acoustic steel
string Martin® (labeled "SS") and a chorused clean
Strat (labeled "CC"). Each volume contains a different
chord type and the idea is that you load the chord types as you
need them in your song and place them on different MIDI channels.
You can actually load two chord types per keyboard layout by choosing
an "upper" or "lower" mapping. We gave you the
choice of regular right handed or left handed playing as well. Once
you have your chord types loaded you can strum them by playing up
and down strokes spread out by octaves. It takes some practice but
you can create some extremely realistic rhythm guitar parts on your
keyboard this way. To add more realism you might want to load the
"extras" volume and put that in omni MIDI mode. What that
will do is provide all of your chords the addition of the "in
between" guitar performance elements, like your "chukas"
and various rhythmic elements, when placed on different MIDI channels.
Get that down and you can fool just about anybody! Of course, overdubbing
in your sequencer is the ideal way to add the elements and tweak
your rhythms to perfection. Then there are simple low notes of the
guitar to add in for use with the chords in folk, rock and country
style playing. We will be offering our own "MIDI Strum Files"
to help you out and give you ideas for songs along with a simple
way of putting them together in your sequencer. By using MIDI to
play the strum up and down strokes of the chords, you can have plenty
of rhythm guitar loops with even more flexibility to change the
tempo without decreasing the quality. This can not always be said
about fixed rhythm guitar audio loops if you were to stretch the
time and pitch to fit them into alternate tempos and keys.
Modern Songwriter also has some things that practically none of
our other libraries have. One is the sampling of modern synths modules
and keyboards. At Sonic Reality we specialize in doing our own sampling
of the acoustic and electric instruments of the world. But, there
are some sounds that come from today’s electronic instruments
and are still important to have. So here you will find pads, brass,
electric pianos other sounds that come from today’s modern
MIDI gear mixed in with a smattering of our "real world"
samples. It’s appropriate to this "modern" genre
to have a little of everything as most of our other titles don’t
cover this ground. You may notice that there is a taste of material
from our other libraries as well with a light version of one of
our Concert Grands as well as Strings, Organs and other instruments
that you would find in abundance on our other professional libraries.
To top it off we offer a slew of great processed and raw acoustic
drum kits with General MIDI mapping for your convenience.
Some of the vocal choir material on this disc is from sessions we
did originally for a vocal collection CD ROM. It may be a little
while before the rest of that material is released on an SR title
but we thought we’d give you a little taste of it here. We
sampled various talented singers from around the world including
Roger Manning (Jellyfish, Imperial Drag, Beck), English singer Karl
Selfe, French opera singer Sonia as well as our very own talented
vocalist and instrumentalist, Gene Siegel (the human jukebox). We
put some keyboard style choir pads on here as well for that in-demand
sound too. There are also various samples of instruments from top
session players and famous artists. For example, drum kits were
sampled from drummers like Toss Panos and Nick D’Virgilio who
play with bands like Tears for Fears, Toy Matinee, Peter Gabriel
and Genesis. There are electric basses sampled from the personal
collection of Jason Scheff, lead singer and bassist of the band
Chicago. String sections were sampled in top notch studios with
musicians who perform on famous Hollywood film scores. The list
goes on and we mention this so you can see that we go to great lengths
to find sounds that have valuable use in professional level music
production. These top recording artists and session musicians work
with Sonic Reality and allow us to sample their instruments because
they like what we do and enjoy using our sounds as well. So, it’s
no exaggeration when we say you are using the sounds the pros use
to make records.
Modern Songwriter has so many different sounds to choose from that
it’s hard not to be inspired to write all day long! We think
that’s a good thing. We hope you enjoy this collection and
let us know if it helped you write a big hit!
Songwriters should also check out Vintage Timetraveler, American
Heartland and World Traveler to compliment this disc and give you
a WORLD OF PLAYABLE SOUND to inspire almost any style of music!
Enjoy!
Dave Kerzner
Sonic Reality
About the Akai Universal
Format
Modern Songwriter was produced exclusively in Sonic Reality’s
Akai Universal format. This means you can use this disc on any hardware
or software sampler that supports the Akai format and expect great
performance. If you’ve used Akai discs in non-Akai samplers
before, you’ve probably experienced a few glitches here and
there, programs that don’t play, clicks and pops, strange filter
settings and the like. While sometimes these problems are unavoidable,
we’ve done our best to make sure that any Akai Universal library
from Sonic Reality loads predictably and reliably, regardless of
which sampler you use.
You’ll notice in the directory that follows that each volume
name is tagged with an alpha-numeric prefix, A1 through I5. This
helps to organize the contents such that when you import this library
into a software sampler, like Emagic’s EXS24 or Steinberg’s
HALion, all of the instruments will be arranged in the same order
as appears in this list.
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