What's new:

New soundfonts: 1. VR-ExtraSynth07 2. TJ-Meinsynt22 3. TJ-Meinsynt21 4. UK-Bells07 5. UK-Basslegend25 6. UK-Basslegend26 7. TJ-Brass05 8. AI-Ethnic05 9. TJ-Meinsynt20 10. DR-10Kits 11. TJ-Meinsynt18 12. TJ-Meinsynt19 Crystal bass and perfect high tones from C1 to C5 in every sample! All of these samples available in members zone only. Register to download!

 

Live Guitars:
Hard distorted guitars for your! Download guitar loops made with our AI-Guitarish09.sf2 :
loop01, loop02,loop03.

Live Pianos:
25 perfect piano sounds availiable!
Listen: AcousticPiano01
Listen: ElectricPiano11
We offer 266,7 Mb of Pianos!

 

What is Synthesizer in general

 

     A synthesizer is an electronic musical instrument. The difference between electronic instruments and acoustic instruments can be illustrated with a few examples: a flute creates its sound by setting a pipe of air into resonation; a violin makes a sound as the player "bows" a string into self-oscillation, which is then transferred and amplified by a specially crafted wooden "case". Acoustic instruments are all mechanical - something must be moving or resonating for sounds to be created.

     Synthesizers are different: they don't create direct sounds, but only electric signals. Without loudspeakers or headphones attached to the synthesizer, it will not be able to make anything even remotely audible - well at least nothing apart from the clicking of the keys. This is really not very far from how your CD-player works: it doesn't make direct sounds either, only electric signals that are turned into sounds by your stereo speakers or your headphones.

     Synthesizers are usually equipped with a piano style keyboard. Each key of the keyboard is actually a switch by which the user can switch electronic circuits on and off. Keyboards are by far the most popular input devices, but the user can also choose to use mouthpieces, strings, guitar-like devices, drum pads or a computer to control the synthesizer.

      Synthesizers are extremely versatile instruments. They can be made to imitate any other instrument - from reed instruments to drums. But the true power of the synthesizer is its possibility to create completely new, yet unheard sounds - even if not all of these sounds are useful for musical purposes.

     Now the new class of synthesizers appeared on the market. It is called virtual synthesizer. Virtual synthesizer is software in digital domain (usually in computer). It produces sound by means of complex mathematical calculation and algorithms. It is much more flexible than hardware synthesizers but it has lack of natural instability of hardware (e.g. dependence of oscillator on voltage) which usually enriches the sound.

 

Pros and Cons of Synthesizer

 

     As far as this web site is dedicated to downloadable samples used in computer based music production systems, we would talk about virtual synthesizers. If computer is equipped with high-equality professional soundcard and software synthesizer implements complex algorithms the sound produced by such system could be compared to the most comprehensive hardware synthesizers.

     As any other software instrument virtual synthesizers usually are polyphonic (they could be monophonic if needed) and could be played in real-time environment. Most of them have several outputs to make mixing easier and some of them are equipped with internal effects. But the most interesting is that the sound is born in real-time, so end-user has practically unlimited control over it in real-time. Pitch shifting, LFOs time and amount of modulation, envelopes and filters could be changed during playing process. This is the main advantage of the synthesizer over other software instruments. But as far as sound id born in real-time by complex mathematical calculations it requires very powerful processing mechanism. Simply saying it consume CPU power. Really good software polyphonic synthesizer, which could be at least as good as to hardware one, could be hardly processed with ordinary PC CPU. In this case DSP (Digital Signal Processor) comes to scene. DSP are as powerful as main computer processor or even more powerful. Several DSPs could provide enough power to play rich polyphonic sound! And this is the major disadvantage of software synthesizer. It consumes huge amount of CPU power making impossible to use it in other applications (e.g. effects processing, mixing and etc.). Naturally, there are a lot of software synthesizers that sound good enough and could be executed on one computer even in several instances, but in this case some software developers sacrifice quality to CPU load.

     Moreover synthesizers could produce very unique sounds, but they are limited in timbre. There is no synth in the world that could precisely produce piano, organ, violin, acoustic drums or bass, flutes sounds simultaniously.

 

What about Sampling?

 

     Well, what should we do to get live complex sound with wide variety of timbres and to save CPU resources? Glad, you asked. The answer is to use sampling technique.

     Sampling in general is a a kind of synthesis where the initial simple oscillator replaced with recorded complex waveform produced by original synthesizer or acoustic instrument. That is way samplers could produce adequately precise sound of pianos, flutes, acoustic basses, drums, different synthes and etc. Samples playback is hundreds and hundreds times easier then calculation complex waveform in real time and takes much less CPU power. Moreover any sampler has envelops and resonance filters to control the sound in real-time. As the result you could have rich complex sound, controlled in real time with minimum CPU costs. But from the other side long lasting sample require memory to be loaded. That was a real problem even several year ago. But nowadays we have even two ways out. The first one is rather straightforward: memory becomes so cheap, that it is possible to load even an hour of raw samples. This is much more then needed in real life. But no matter how cheap memory is it costs some money. And here goes the second solution based on new playback technique. It is called hard disk streaming. Practically all popular software samplers allows to playback samples on the fly, directly from the hard disk where they are stored. As the result you can use really huge samples limited in size only by operating system! That means you can load and playback even multi-gigabytes samples! And do not forget that they are based on rich sounded, complex waveforms and utilize minimum CPU power.

 

Quality issues

 

     As you see, qulaity of sampled sound partially on compexity and quality of the samples/waveforms and quality of of assembling of initially recorded samples/waveforms into one sample/patch. There are a lot of samples on the Net, but most of them (especially free ones) are use simple waveforms and assambled with very low quality (bad start/end loop points, if they are presented at all). So, how to distinguish crude sample/patch from the perfect one before downloading? Just, read about sample/patch to see is this one impenemts multisampling feature ot not. If sample/patch is multisampled (have at least two or more samples/waveforms per layout or velocity) that means the first sign that this sample/patch done in professional way (multisampling consumes a lot of time and requires good skills and equipment). 4-5 initial samples/waveforms per 5 octaves in one multisampled sample/patch is minimum requirement of full-ranged sample/patch. But the more the better. More initially reacorded samples/waveforms allow to reach more prcise sound of originally sampled instrument. For example, all of hundreds of SoundZone.INFO samples avaliable for members have at least 11 initially recorded samples/waveforms per 5 octaves.

     There are a lot sounds in real world which could sound very long time. Looping technique is intended to deliver this long-lasting possiblility of sound. If the start and end loop point are set very precise, the samples will sound as natuaral and long as origial ones. But it is very difficult to find correct loop points even in one mono sample/waveform. One should have special software, skills and time to set pricise loop points for each channel of each samples/waveform of multisample instrument. Only real professional samples like SoundZone.INFO ones are correctly looped through entire range of samples/waveforms.

 

How you could download real professional samples?

 

     Naturally you may have a look over the Net for professional samples (approx. 2-3 dollars USD per sample or 60+ dollars per CD without shipping costs), but you may donwload hunderds and hunderds of professional samples from our web site rigt now!. Just look through the list of samples we offer and register here to get instant access just for 10 dollars USD.