Sat May 04, 2013 7:02 am
If quality is paramount, doing all of the steps manually is the way to go. This belief comes from having prepared tens of thousands of samples over the past fifteen years.
By far the most difficult task is noise reduction. Unless done with utmost care, the sample will have obvious digital artifacts such as:
-a hollow sound like listening through a paper tube
-a "swimming" sound
-loss of upper harmonics
-loss of fundamental
-degraded attack transients
-spurious frequencies added to the note
When you record the pipes, hold each note for around ten seconds and wait three seconds after the reverb decays. This will give you plenty of space between notes to capture noise prints. There is only one tool that I trust for noise reduction, Sound Forge. IMO, nothing else comes close. Using NR is a skill not unlike learning to play the organ. Good technique takes lots and lots of practice. When I do NR, I always do one note at a time using multiple passes. I do an A/B comparison after each pass with the unprocessed copy of the sample. If I hear any degradation I start over. One single note can take several attempts. Many times a note simply cannot be denoised without messing it up. If that's the case you have to find a less noisy rank to record. Theatre organs are generally much noisier than classical instruments and only a few are suitable for sampling. If there is not at least a 40dB signal to noise ratio in the recorded notes, find another organ to record. Soft strings such as a Dulciana are the most difficult.
Doing loops and releases is also best done manually using your ears. The only good loop is one that cannot be detected by ear. Again, practice is the key.
Trimming the samples should also be done manually.
If it is beginning to sound like incredibly tedious work then you're quite right. It helps to be OCD. If a sample set producer is lazy and tries to do everything the easy way, the results will speak for themselves.
Joe Hardy