Massive confusion about sounds

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microchip

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My questions about sounds are divided into 5 parts...answer as many as you like :)

1. Synthesizer sounds. I have a Roland synth. Naturally it comes with a set amount of sounds. Sounds are very important to me because I record in audio, not MIDI. Are most the sounds that come with 'general' synths the same? I know that the Roland xp-80 comes with an expansion board so you could probably get every sound possible right? Do other synths have expansions that can be added on that are NOT MIDI?

2. I am an ambient music artist. I am trying to find some kind of equipment that can create realy abstract mechanical/space-like sounds and deep drones. Is there something other than a synth that would assist me in creating these?

3. With sampling. When I see ads in the recording magazines for brass, or drums, or ads for the gigasampler, does that only work in MIDI?? Otherwise, how would you actually 'play' a piece of music from sounds of a sampler disc?

4. With my synth, I have all the abilities to have reverb, rotary, flanger, overdrive, compressor, etc. Do the rack components do anything different that I can't already do on my synth?

5, Finally, with all the possibilities in changing sounds...whether it be compressor, reverb, or using mixing equipment that comes with my Cakewalk program, is there some kind of book or any other item that will give me information on what all the different effects exactly do and how they affect sounds? There are some effects that get into 6-7 frequency bands and some of these synth settings just don't make any sense to me.

Thanks for all the imput...Microchip
 
Question 1: No, the sounds are not the same. Each manufacturer uses their own sounds, and each manufacturer's idea of what sounds good and what doesn't is not necessarily always the same as yours or anyone else's. Whether the expansion board offers any sound possible depends on if you can edit or load up anything on the expansion board or if it's just another set of more-or-less fixed sounds. Most good synths also offer a lot of flexibility editing and blending waveforms to create new sounds yourself out of the raw material; you don't have to just play the presets.

Question #2: a synth is one tool. A sampler would be another. A computer can be used to act as either, and run software where you could take any sound and manipulate the crap out of it.

Question #3: CDs of sampled sounds fall into two general categories -- sound sets (in, for example, Gigasampler format) that can be loaded in a sampler as a sound set, to be triggered with MIDI commands, or as raw audio that can be opened in most samplers and from which you would make a sound set yourself fro your ownsampler... and loops, which are basically sampled musical parts -- phrases, licks, beats, ambience that changes over time -- that can be repeated to create tracks using a tool like ACID or SONAR software.

Question #4 -- not sure what you are asking. I suspect you are comparing rack effects to the ones built in your keyboard?

Usually the ones in keyboards are passably good, but they are not very useful for applying to any sounds other than those inside the synth -- for example, vocal or guitar tracks in a multitrack recording.

Also the external multi-effectors usually have more effects, more flexibility in editing paramters of the effects (like reverb depth).

The effects in a keyboard vary wildly in quality and in number of effects, but bear in mind they are part of the total cost of the keyboard and so they can't possibly be as good as excellent stand-alone professional effects can be without causing the synth to cost an astronomical amount of money.

Question #5 -- well, there are plenty of books on effects and what the typical parameters are and do. It's a learning curve. First you really need to understand the fundamentals of audio; then, you can understand what the various devices do to manipulate sounds. The settings often make sense once you know the basic ideas. Pick almost any of the books on general recording -- in almost all cases the basic concepts are the same whether it's digital or not.

There, I actually hit all five!
 
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