Slides in an audio plug-in using samples

Hello,

I’m sampling a guitar and I want to bring the technique of “Sliding” to the plug-in. For some of my features like playing the note using the “palm mute” technique, the user has to press a “unused” MIDI key just a bit before the actual note that he wants to play. I mean, for example he wants to play the note E4 in palm mute style, he has to press a different MIDI key that is “out of the guitar range anyway” just a short bit befor he presses E4, so I know that I have to play a different sample.

But talking about slides, that seems to be kind of impossible, because we maybe know on what note he starts the slide, but not on what note he “ends” it. :thinking:

Does someone here have a hint, how to do sliding or where to start?

Thanks in advance

your technique hot key will not slide but enable the slide mode in order to let know your engine that the next key pressed is the one to slide to from your current position.

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I presume that you will have lots of different slide samples?

If that is the case then perhaps you could use an entire octave that is “out of range” to denote that the next key should be a slide.

eg. C#0 denotes the next note is a semi-tone slide, D0 is a whole tone, D#0 is a slide by a third etc. etc.
Perhaps if you wanted up to 2 octave slides you could instead of using 2 octaves of keys have C0 denote that the slide is +1 octave.
Also perhaps you might want another key that denotes the slide should be downwards rather than up.

The problem with this approach is the length of the slide is determined by the sample, and not by the BPM being used which is far from ideal. A simple gliassando of the sample pitch isn’t really going to give the same effect though as physically running fingers up the fret board as I suspect it won’t sound quite “natural” because fingers running over the frets is sure to impart some tonal difference that you would not get from a glissando on the sample pitch. You could of course time stretch your samples, but that presents a whole load of new issues.

I’m using this approach (“hot key” as @otristan is calling it) for other techniques as well, yes. So e.g. to identify if the note should be played with a plektrum or finger, I use a “hot key” ( = note out of instrument range).

Doing the same with slides seems to be tricky :thinking:

At the moment I’ve not recorded samples. I’m still trying to figurae out, what’s the best way to go. And honestly, I don’t know at the moment. Every approach I can think of has a lot of “issues”…

Honestly it’s not something that you should be doing in c++
or at least not prototype in C++

Try a script engine in a sampler of the market (Falcon, Halion or Kontakt)

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Hm, I need to have a “standalone” VST, not something that is linked to a software like Kontakt. And when I’m informed correct, you can’t create VSTs with Kontakt, just create your own library for Kontakt. Same with Halion and Falcon, right?

I’ve already implemented everything I need, except of slides.

What is the reason, that I “should not do this [slides] with C++”?

My purpose was that if you were trying to figure how to do your instrument and just began to do it in c++, it might have been easier to first do a prototype in an already working platform where you can sketch very quickly, so the c++ part would “just” have been to make it work in c++ :slight_smile:

Like some people using max/msp or python to do their FX algorithm and then port it to c++ where thing are usually less handy.