The story
Dipping my toes in the world of sample creation I started out with sampling my wives harp. The harp is the model Teresa of the German company Riedel and was bought many years ago. Just to see if this is a process I like doing I made this instrument in the free Decent Sampler format. As this is my first virtual instrument I kept it very simple. One mic position, one velocity layer and no round robins. I did add the reverb controls to the instrument as the sound of a harp is greatly influenced by it’s environment. And as it was recorded in an environment without any acoustic treatment most time was spent on cleaning up the samples from unwanted noise. Izotope RX was most useful here. The one mic position was occupied by a Lewitt LCT140 Air with air enabled positioned in the middle sound hole. An Audient ASP 800 was used as preamp going to a Cymatic uTrack24 via ADAT. Each note was sampled although not all of them made it into the final instrument. The ones that really sounded different attack wise from the ones next to them were left out. This was mitigated by having the sample that is a half note higher being spread out a bit. Being a programmer in daily life the process of arranging all files and creating some configuration wasn’t that hard. Although the technical documentation of Decent Sampler has some room for improvement I think anyone can do this. Having done this made me realize there is a lot of manual labour involved of which some steps could be automated on my side. Both in my daw reaper for various repetitive tasks and for creating the dspreset file. Overall it was fun to do. And that’s what matters most to me. If somebody actually finds this instrument useful it would be a great bonus.
Interface
Reviews for Riedel Teresa
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
Very nice sounds!
This harp library that you made is actually a very great start! Love the samples, and I'm sure that it'll fit perfectly in some new orchestra arrangements that I might make.
A nicely sampled harp!
I don't think I've found such a well sampled harp in Pianobook, but this is a very nice one for sure! It is responsive and dynamic, though I did find the lower velocities to be harder to reach, something that can be easily fixed during programming. It would be great with some extra dev tweaking.
Inside the GUI you will find Reverb controls, though I noticed that the middle one (Size) is not mapped properly. When you try to grab it, you select the one on the right instead (Wet), so you have to click a little bit on the left to access it.
Rich and even tone.
First off, this harp has a lovely rich sound and if need a low resource instrument to provide a gliss, strum or run in a composition then this is perfect - great job and a great first attempt at sampling. Any comments I could make about dynamic layers or round robins are irrelevant as they are all mentioned by the author. The only thing I will add is that, as someone who uses RX for a living, I can hear it "working" on the samples as they decay. It's totally not a problem in the context of this sound and I'm sure most won't even notice - but this is one of the challenges with using something like RX and indeed why I haven't made any sampled instrument yet - its tough finding a space quiet enough in which to record them. Great job though, yes, it's tons of work sometimes and I think a lot of people don't appreciate just how much. Looking forward to your next one...
Barebones but still pretty nice
The recording and tone of this is pretty nice but the lack of dynamic layers and round robins make it pretty unrealistic. Its your first instrument so this is definitely understandable. Good luck on your journey and i would love to see a more deeply sampled version of this harp somewhere down the line
