When I was 14, me and my family visited Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, in the US. Whilst there, I became fascinated by the old instruments they used to play, the fife in particular. So, me being a very impulsive child, the next day I asked my mum if I could buy one. We went looking on the internet, and found a cheap, wooden fife, which we then purchased. Fast forward six years later, and I still can’t play the thing too well. At the very least, I can play it well enough to sample it, and that’s exactly what I decided to do.

I recorded the fife using my trusty Røde NT1-A microphone, recording 4 round robins per note. I decided to pitch the samples down two octaves, and re-render them in order to expand the range of the instrument from just over one octave, to just over three octaves. I then threw the samples through quite a bit of reverb to turn them into an ambient pad, and I really like how it sounds. It’s got a very mellow, and soft sound, whilst still containing a crisp high end. I also included a patch with just the dry fife so that people can edit it to their liking if the pad doesn’t quite work for them.

I’m getting a lot more comfortable with the XML coding required to make Decent Sampler libraries, so I decided to practice my chops with this one. It includes the usual reverb and filter knobs, but also has full ADSR control. Both patches also have velocity scaling to add that extra bit of spice.

I wanted to try adding true legato to this library, but in the end chose to forego that; I just wasn’t good enough at playing the fife to make all those transitions happen naturally, and trying to replicate them in a DAW is incredibly difficult, which I found out the hard way.

In the end, despite this library not completely reaching the heights I was aiming for, I’m still really happy with how it turned out, and would easily call this my best sampling work. I hope people can get a lot of use out of it!

Sincerely,
Hidde