LPC versus RealStart (Initial impressions)

[Johannes]

Hello everybody

Listening to the Voodoo Demo and the original from Hendricks I actually got inspired. The Voodoo Demo definitely roooocks!

A friend of mine with whom I interchange ideas wrote me today the following.

I thought it would be interesting to share this pensive information.




Hey Johannes

I've been keeping an eye out for Realstrat for a very long while. Musiclab dropped the ball on releasing it in a timely manner, which is why I went for LPC, CHG, and LD (Prominy's LPC, Chris Hein's guitar library, and Bela D's Lyrical Distortion, respectively).

Honestly, I think LPC blows everything out of the water STILL, even after two and a half years and despite being 16-bit.

Here are my initial impressions based on watching that video demo (RealStrat_Voodoo_Demo.avi) probably a dozen or so times.

The current Realstrat demo sounds alright. Definitely passable, and I doubt any layman listening to the music would suspect it's not a real guitar (which is, ultimately, the only test that really matters). The vibrato sounds hideous, though, and the bending sounds a bit artificial (except for the keyswitched ones, like on the very last note of the demo, where an actual slide sample is clearly being used). The vibrato is clearly just a simple LFO (with probably some filters in place so they can claim "it's more than a simple LFO, okay?! It changes frequencies and stuff like a real vibrato!!). I'd sure like to hear the pinch harmonics and the slides. Oh, and the palm mutes, too (for chugga-chugga power chords).

I write metal, man. And I need a metal guitar. I think the pick noises sounds okay. Good pick noise recording is important when writing alternate picking or sweep picking passages. But it sounds kinda fake because Realstrat lets you adjust the pick noise volume independent of the volume of the string being struck. That means they chopped off the very tip of the sample in order to let you adjust the pick noise yourself.

The problem with this is that pick noise is not a noise like the sounds of the frets, or a bridge mute or something, where the sound exists outside the bounds of the guitar's normal acoustics. The pick noise is the initiation of the string vibrations, and it is tied into the fundamental of the string's harmonics. Chop that out, and you lose the natural initiation of the fundamental. Add it back in after the fact, and suddenly it sounds like a bunch of scratchy little chimes being tacked onto the beginning of each note, with little of the cause-and-effect mechanism that defines the sound of a picked electric guitar string and which your ears have gotten used to hearing after billions of electric guitar-driven songs, even if you can't consciously single it out.

LPC just sounds right. I've played a lot of guitars in my time, and while Realstrat sounds like an electric guitar for sure, it doesn't sound like a Strat to me. LPC sounds EXACTLY like a Les Paul. Prominy got a good, clean, natural recording and they didn't screw with it. One thing that bugs me a bit about Musiclab is that they'd rather keep hard disk space down than give the user authentic performances.

For example, in Realguitar, slides and hammer-ons are faked using clever scripting that derives its source data from the straight sustain samples, and to my ears it's clearly audible. It sounds good, but unnatural. Hard to explain... I love Realguitar and use it all the time, but people who hear the slides and the hammer-ons say to me "Hey, whoa, those slides sounded cool, how'd you do that?" They think I found some innovative way to perform the slide. It sounds like a real slide that I performed on a real guitar, but it sounds like I came up with a fancy new way to slide. Get what I'm saying? In LPC, everybody hears the slides and knows how it was played because it's a real sample of a real slide, which sounds completely natural.

Unless you're writing pop for the masses, you have to assume people listening to your guitar music like guitar performances and are familiar with how certain techniques are supposed to sound, even if they don't know exactly how those techniques are actually performed.

Will I buy Realstrat? Yes.

Do I think LPC is better? Yes.

Why? Because LPC has greater scripting potential.

Now I know I just said I have a problem with Musiclab faking performances using scripting. The thing is, if you use the script to reproduce the acoustical phenomena of the performance you're trying to emulate... well, that's different than trying to reproduce the SOUND.

Here's what I mean...

Take the bends in Realstrat. It's clearly just an automated pitch shift that goes up and down with the pitch wheel - just like any other sample library or VSTi. I know Sergey says there's a filter associated with the pitch bend which somehow makes it more sophisticated - and he has a point - but that's only part of the equation. Now, does this bend system have the same SOUND that a pitch bend does? Yes. A guitar bend should sound like the pitch of the note is slowly sliding up or down. And that's the sound in Realstrat. But is this the correct emulation for reproducing the acoustical phenomena at work? No. But I can do it in LPC, because LPC's an open-source library that lets me tweak the programming in Kontakt 2.

I've developed a K2 script that lets me do formant-corrected pitch bends.
That means that if I bend from C5 down to B5, that B5 pitch is formant corrected so that the fundamental harmonics are identical to a real B5 pitch (as if I'd played a B5 note from the start). A bend on a guitar is simply a shifting of the fundamental, and I can reproduce it with a K2 script. Now comes Sergey's filter, except mine is more sophisticated and closer to what happens in real life - when you bend the string, you produce greater tension on the string between the nuts and the bridge. If the bend is closer to the nuts, that means you're going to steadily lose energy in the lower half series of the harmonics towards the bridge - 7500Hz and below. If the bend is closer to the bridge, that means you're going to lose energy in the upper half series - 7501Hz and above. These harmonic series are closely tied to the actual construction of a Les Paul Custom, and are different for every guitar (on a Stratocaster, these harmonic series are different for each string).

The speed of the energy decay is dependant on the string being played. So I have two automated single-pole filters set up in the script. Each string in LPC is programmed such that if I do a bend, the script will read which fret I'm playing at, determine if it's the lower or upper harmonic series, then do the filtered decay at the appropriate speed for that string.

Good luck pulling any of that off in Realstrat, unless they have it hard-coded that way (and I can hear that they don't).

I'll be knocking out a demo or two using LPC in the coming months... I'd like to do an audio/video tutorial. Something quick and simple, to help out the community. And you'll be able to hear my awesome bends at that time.

Hmm... rambled a bit, didn't I?

Bottom line is, Realstrat's good, LPC's better (in the sonic department... maybe not necessarily in the playability department, where you kind of have to develop your own system of multis and scripts), and Prominy's new Strat library will very likely sound like an actual Fender Stratocaster, given Prominy's dedication to accurate and faithful representation of their sampled instruments.

Again, I will be buying Realstrat. But LPC will remain my go-to library for the ultimate in realistic, no-questions-asked electric guitar performances.
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You can’t get it wrong and you never get it done—
on this ongoing adventure, you can have so much fun.

[CosmicD]

Good overview of the differences, and I can kinda understand but I can also bring this down to one thing.

Call me lazy but I hate to have to develop scripts and stuff myself and endlessly tweak a sampler in order for my performance to sound real. The power of RG is that you can make something sound realisting by just pressing keys, and you don't have to tweak too much.

I also think RS is actually made to be as simple as possible.

For example: to overcome the pitched bends, If you choose bends as slides all is resolved no ? I'm not a guitar player at all so maybe I don't feel the nuances that are missing from a real guitar playing for doing so. I think it sounds cool (while the pitch is slided instead of bent)

You're gonna hear that in a clean guitar solo, but with a heavy distortion box: will somebody care ? The masses are not gonna care, and for those really good listeners: I guess you'd rather use a real guitar, because if all said and done, their critique actually is gonna be 'why do you use this?"

Ofcourse it'd be a blast to fool them too. But you can, if your melody isn't too complex. I just think: the more 'virtuoso play' the melody has to play, the more it has to be accompanied with careful tweaking.

What about the strat timbre ? OK, I've never really gone into the specifics of what a strat should sound like. When distorted: won't an E guitar just sound like it's amplifier that you send it trough rather than the 'strat', or gibson or ibanez or whatever you use..

I've ran some dry samples from here trough guitarrig2 and I just think it's off the hook, it sounds real E-guitar and you have all these possibilities to grunge, death metal, clean sound.... and this typicality is all that matters to me.
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[lucky909091]

I exactly know what Johannes means.

I am just an arranger but not a programmer. I would never understand the programming of a Kontakt-script.

I just want to have real-sounding software for my customers who cannot afford real musicians within a music production.

the other customers want a real guitar performer anyway.

[CosmicD]

well that's it exactly. BUt it's really something we can afford to want only recently. The keyswitches already were a great helper in making it suitable for musicians who want to be a musician. THen came legato detection and when developers are able to automate more and more things and to make these automation toys suitable for musicians (not programmers) to understand and execute, we're on a good road.

If I wanted to program and tweak, I will go make music for the 8bits nintendo
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[OldGeezer]

The only thing that has kept me from buying Prominy was reading in a couple places that a few notes were out of tune and it was driving someone nuts -that and the fact that there a couple of amazing products just around the corner...a quite far-away corner it turns out. But I'm starting to think about it again.

I was somewhat surprised when I read a comment by Sergey yesterday where he mentions the size of the whole program is about 1Gb. 1Gb in 16 bit? My "Overdrive" library for K2 is in 16 bit and the sample folder is 5.13Gb! I love the way it's made and the ton of articulations. Too bad I hate (HATE) the way it sounds...I can't play with it for more than 5 minutes without trying to change the sound some way or another. If VSL had recorded it clean, I'd have never looked elsewhere.

The 16 vs 24 bit isn't a big deal to me. I figure since music CDs are all 16 bit anyways, what's the big deal? The size of the sampleset does concern me though. I hope the guy who wrote that Prominy info writes a detailed comparisson when he gets RS...and hopefuly soon. I've got twoguitar libraries that I don't use, one that sounds like hell and another that is a joke, and I've got a bad feeling I'm gonna be kicking myself for having waited all this time.

The one thing I can say for RS is that you don't need an expensive (albeit incredible) sampler like Kontakt 2 into which to load the samples. I'm pretty sure that all the automations in RS are possible in Kontakt2, and programming in Kontakt2 aint that hard...took me about 5 minutes to figure out how to program a unison bend feature using the sustain pedal as a trigger and saving the resulting "instrument".

But still, for alot of people, the cost of K2 on top of Prominy might be a tad expensive. The choice becomes alot harder for those, like me, who already own Kontakt 2.

[J van E]

[tom27]

Since I couldn´t wait any longer for Real Strat to be released due to upcoming projects, I have purchased LPC (with a bleeding heart at first, I must say, because I really *wanted* to purchase Real Strat).

However - as Johannes´ friend wrote - LPC is sounding extremely real. So real that I have played a short bit to a friend of mine (who is Guitarist) and he was convinced to hear a Les Paul. In fact, I have purchased the Clean version and amped it with Waves GTR. The results are fantastic, although - and that´s the downside - LPC is *much-much* harder to use that Real Guitar (and resumably Real Strat). Unless you aren´t into programming scripts, you must use the enclosed multis, which require you to press a lot of things simultaneously (or record them one-by-one) to get the desired results. But once you have them, they sound as if you were playing a Les Paul!

BTW: Regarding the size of Real Strat vs. LPC etc. you should keep in mind that many samples also increase loading time. Some people with older PCs/Macs say that loading the basic "LPC Super Multi" takes around 7 minutes (yep, seven!) - over here on a Mac Pro 3.0 Quad, it´s quite okay but still pretty long. And - what I think it bad - you need to rely on Native Instruments KONTAKT. Native have always screwed up things and they still do. Therefore e.g. some LPC functionality broke with the previous Kontakt versions (fixed now, but still annoying how long it took). From that point of view, having one instrument from one manucaturer namely MusicLab is much more desireable.

BTW: It´s sad that Johannes didn´t post a link to the scripts his friend made. They sound very interesting and I am sure a lot of LPC users would appreciate them (and ever pay a small fee

Cheers
Tom

[J van E]

[SyQuEsT]

I have Prominy's LPC and I'm testing RealStrat. I can told you the feeling isn't the same at all.

LPC has some detune notes, use a lot of RAM, doesn't have a chord detector, ... Sounds good !

With RS you've all you want ... and more. Sounds good too, no detune notes, can load many instances in one computer, has a chord detector, many FX or kind of articulations.

I'm not here to compare this 2 products, I like them both. But if you want a real strat feeling, RS is a most

[Johannes]

Great folks, all the input.

I specifically liked 2 points in the email of my friend:

1. The current Realstrat demo (Voodoo Demo) sounds alright. Definitely passable, and I doubt any layman listening to the music would suspect it's not a real guitar (which is, ultimately, the only test that really matters).

2. I will be buying Realstrat.


Of course I will also be buying RealStrat. A wonderful creation.

Johannes
_________________
You can’t get it wrong and you never get it done—
on this ongoing adventure, you can have so much fun.

[fishermusic]

LPC is out of tune.

[tom27]

[CosmicD]

LOL, here's a challenge to make something similar in RS

PS: In the later passage of that demo you hear a weird kind of playing technique which actually starts with a small bend up i think.

If you don't know what i'm talking about, you also hear that in the beginning of 'carwas', by rose royce.

It's almost as if you hear 2 of the same notes at once, but one is quickly bent up. How's that technique called and can yo do that with RS too?
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[fishermusic]

[J van E]