two or more instruments playing in unison

2001-12-27 05:00 am

When two or more insruments (each on their own staffs) are notated to play the same note in unison only one instrument plays back.The others are cancelled out. I was told that this is a limitation of my sound card.Can anyone recommend sound cards that do not have this limitation?

Re: two or more instruments playing in unison

Reply #1 – 2001-12-27 05:00 am

Just about every synthesizer will do this, at least to some degree. The reason is that you're using the same sound patch, starting at almost the same time, therefore the same waveform is added to itself. In "real" instruments, there will always be minor differences between instruments playing unison, which the ear can discern and therefore identify two instruments.

Whether the waves from your sound card cancel or reinforce will depend partly on the pitch; this is because even though two midi events at the same time *appear* to be simultaneous, they're not really; there will be a slight time delay between them because midi is a serial protocol.

So much for the academic aspect. You can improve the sound of your unisons using one or more of the following techniques:

1) use a different sound patch, if available and appropriate, for the two voices. E.g. Grand Piano and Bright Piano, or String Ensemble 1 and String Ensemble 2, etc. Or use a different patch bank, set for a different soundfont (SBLive! users mainly, but might be a useful technique for other hardware setups also.)

2) put a slight pitch bend on one or both voices. E.g. put about +200 on one voice, and -200 on the other.

2a) pan the two voices left and right of center (only really effective when used in conjunction with the pitch-bend trick, since otherwise the unison will just appear to come from center-channel.)

3) Mute one of the unisons (e.g. by using the volume controller set to 0) and make the other one correspondingly louder. (Don't forget to restore the volume after the end of the muted note.)

HTH

Fred

Re: two or more instruments playing in unison

Reply #2 – 2001-12-28 05:00 am

Fred,

Thanks for the info. I'll try your suggestions.

Jack