Brass Review by Roger Hooper

Arturia BRASS

Introduction

Brass sounds have been some of the most requested patches from keyboard customers when trying out the latest and greatest new workstations in the local music shop. Over the years, composers have used everything to try to recreate realistic trumpet performances, from modular synthesizers “back in the day”, to the expensive hardware samplers of the 90’s, the ever-evolving line of keyboard workstations, and the large sample libraries for use in today’s DAW programs.

Enter Arturia, the creator of TAE, a process that has resulted in the release of authentic-sounding software emulations of Moog Modular and Minimoog, Arp 2600, Yamaha CS-80, and Prophet 5 and VS synthesizers. Arturia has partnered with the French research institute IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musicque) to create the first software physical model of a brass instrument. IRCAM was created in 1969, with composer Pierre Boulez as its first director, and has incorporated the study of music with science, developing research projects in software and hardware. This would seem to be the perfect environment for investigating and recreating the physical properties of brass and wind instruments.

One complaint of the many sampled brass sounds over the years has been the static nature of the sound. Most keyboard workstations don’t have enough memory to recreate the sound in a way to satisfy the ears of the average horn player. The sample libraries may have large samples to get the tone right, but creating the idiosyncrasies of a horn performance can still be a challenge. In 1994, Yamaha (who in 2005 bought Arturia) released the first physical modeling keyboard, the VL1, which specialized in brass and woodwind emulation. They followed the VL1 with the VL7, VL70M, and VL expansion cards (user-installable option boards for many or their keyboard models). The synthesis in the VL series offers a model of a tube, and many parameters to determine length, flare of the bell at the end, airflow, etc. An expressive, musical performance is possible with practice, and the resulting sound of the VL models is excellent. Korg also has created quality physical models of brass and woodwind instruments in the Prophecy and Z1 synthesizers. I used a VL7 with BC3 breath controller to trigger BRASS for this review.

How does the new Arturia instrument fare?

First, We Must Install

The computer used for this review was a Mac G4 dual 1.25gHz cpu with 2 gigs of ram. The minimum configuration for BRASS is a PC (with Windows 98 SE/2000/XP) or Mac (OS X 10.2 on up) with a 1.5gHz processor and at least 256mb of RAM. I look at these specs as if I had a single processor, so I was aware my cpu might be underpowered for this task. It was, to a degree…

BRASS comes with a Syncrosoft dongle. After installing BRASS, the dongle is authorized, and then the program can be moved from one computer to another. The program is the dongle so to speak, so don’t lose it! If, like many folks, you have a laptop AND a desktop computer, and you want to use BRASS on the road, make sure the dongle goes with you. Could be considered an inconvenience, but I understand the need to fight software piracy.

When I installed BRASS and opened Apple Logic Pro, I got the dreaded “AU failed” message from Logic’s AU Manager, followed by a Syncrosoft error message. I went to Syncrosoft’s site and downloaded the latest version of the Syncrosoft License Control. I then booted up “License Control Center “(put in the Mac’s applications folder by the Syncrosoft install), went to the “Wizards” drop down menu, selected “activate date licenses”, typed in the license number furnished in the BRASS package, and was off and running.

Time To Play

My tendency when getting a new instrument is to start playing right away. This was no exception, and owning a Yamaha VL7 and a Korg Z1, I had a little “heads up” on the kind of experience that was around the corner. Sample libraries are great to work with, but physical modeling gives you an opportunity to breathe some life into the sound, in a manner of speaking. And the three horns in BRASS have a lot of life in their sound. The trumpet and trombone are alternately, bright, mellow, and punchy; they respond to your performance, and sound like the instruments they purport to be. The choice of notes and use of controllers is key in creating an authentic performance with these instruments. Phrasing and articulation are very important for creating the illusion of a genuine brass performance as well. The sax at first blush was a bit unappealing to my ears, but after listening to mp3s of a variety of saxophone artists (and focusing on their sustained notes), I gave it another try, and found it to sound…like a real saxophone. Perhaps I need to change my playing style to recreate an accurate sax performance? More to come on this thought…

After some noodling around, I disciplined myself to “put down the breath controller” and crack open the manual. I mentioned previously about my tendency to play first, read later…I think reading the manual first in this case provides a rewarding experience when first playing the instruments. The manual for BRASS is very well written (in English, French, and Japanese), and provides some info regarding the research behind the programming. A brief but thorough explanation is provided detailing the physical properties of the sound generation in trumpets, trombones, and saxophones. This proves to be very helpful in choosing how to control the parameters of each instrument. There is also a brief tutorial on the nature of a handful of styles: pop/rock, reggae, dance/funk, jazz, classical, fanfare/military, with suggestions for arranging. At the very least, read through the quick start section. Playing with BRASS will make more sense, and happiness will then ensue…

The GUI for BRASS is very well organized: simple, elegant, easy to navigate.

Fig. 1: BRASS GUI

There are two modes for BRASS: Live and Riff. The Live mode is the basic set of instruments, and the mode for, as its name implies, live performance. The three instruments are listed on the left. In the middle there are 8 parameters, which become quite fluid looking during a performance, responding to MIDI controller info. The little arrows at the top and bottom of each parameter are used to determine the amount of modulation. The parameters deal with different aspects of the brass instrument sound: attack, pressure (lip pressure on the mouth piece), pitch timbre, noise (the sound of the air in the ‘column’), vibrato, vibrato frequency, and mute. You get the choice of five mutes. Three of them are static: dry, bowl, and harmon. Two are dynamic (you can automate them): plunger and wahwah. The saxophone offers a selection of three mouthpieces: standard (plastic), classic (metal), and wood. The mute and mouthpiece choices are an example of the extent to which Arturia wants to recreate the authentic performance practice of brass instruments. The mouthpiece types make a difference (just as in “real life”) in the tone for the sax. Sax players want to use the different types for different applications, etc., so having the options here will allow the user to hone in on the desired tone for the playing style at hand. Generally speaking, keyboard horn sounds may give you one mute; BRASS gives you five, and they all sound different.

All the parameters (except for ‘attack’) are automatable (see fig. 2); click on button ‘A’ and you have a graph that allows MIDI-syncable automation to be drawn in. (See fig. 2) It can be looped, or one-shot. So, you can affect a change in the lip pressure, bring in the noise a bit stronger after the initial attack, and have it loop over and over, or just occur at a specific point. This is a great feature, especially when working in a MIDI based scoring situation, and you want to keep a lot of the motion in the sound in tempo, or you have a pretty good idea of how the pressure or vibrato should change in time, but can’t get the hang of it with your keyboard’s controllers.

Fig. 2: Modulating the parameters

The instruments in BRASS have seventeen presets, many named for a performance style, jazz soloist, ballad, classical, etc. You can roll your own and add custom presets to the list. Below the preset list is a complete file menu for saving, importing, exporting, etc.

On the right hand side of the screen there are 3 menus. “Configuration” offers a selection of four different attacks, each one tailored to a certain playing style; in the manual Arturia recommends certain attacks for certain types of music. This is another aspect of the manual that is very helpful. You can also select up to four instances (all have the same parameter settings) of the instrument in the Configuration section; cpu load, beware! There is also a humanization feature, which offers three settings, and anywhere in-between: beginner, human, computer. Each setting controls how much the amount of fluctuation in sound occurs by the manipulation of the parameters. The “beginner” is more exaggerated, much as a beginning student would play, lacking great control over the instrument. "Computer" keeps everything at the numbers dialed in for the parameters; “human” allows more fluctuation to occur in the sound, sort of analogous (no pun intended!) to “analog feel” in VA synths and analog-type soft synths.

“Spacialization” provides room placement and ambience. Ambience will give you a very basic room reverb, nothing to replace a high end verb such as Logic’s Space Designer, but a nice feature, none-the-less. The controls for ambience are spartan: amount and color (warm to cold), plus the ability to move the instrument image about in the 3D room. Simple, but adequate for trying to emulate the sound playing in your room, or perhaps band room at school, on stage, etc.; a more natural way to get some extra life into the sound.

“ MIDI-Settings” has a good amount of programming options. First up is the type of controller used: keyboard only, keyboard with aftertouch, keyboard & breath controller. The latter was my favorite, in that I use a Yamaha BC3 breath controller quite a bit. Blowing into this controller to affect volume or lip pressure helped to create a kind of “organic” vibe in performing with the BRASS instruments. Keyboard sensitivity is next, allowing the setting of velocity and aftertouch response. Keyboards are all different, most allow the programming of this, but it is nice having the function right here in the software. Below these parameters are MIDI connexions (is that a French thing?): five “hard-wired” MIDI controllers, and eight destinations, connectable by cords. This reminded me of the cords function in the EMU EIV series of samplers. There are also four user controller slots. These can be filled up, connected to destinations, then you can select another four controllers, connect them, etc., all the while keeping the original four controller/destination sets. Very cool indeed.

At the bottom of the screen in Live Mode is a keyboard for use with your computer’s mouse. BRASS offers the three instruments in the pitch ranges of their “real” counterparts. The keys outside the natural range are grey. When selecting the trombone, the low C, C#, D, and D# are of a different color: they are key switches for Legato Mode (in green) and Pitch Blend mode (in blue). In Legato Mode, the low C will trigger a short legato between notes, the C# a longer one. In Pitch Mode, two modes are addressed: harmonic mode and slide mode. Pressing the D (harmonic mode) produced a distance of whole step down and a seventh up when utilizing the pitch wheel. Pressing the D# (slide mode) produced a half step down, a whole step up. It took awhile before I realized that I could hold the key switches down and release my right hand from the keyboard before triggering the subsequent melodic line. Once I figured that one out, it was great fun playing with the key switches.

The Riffage

The Riff mode was where I ran into trouble. This mode offers hundreds of short brass phrases, solo and in sections, utilizing a variety of styles: pop, jazz, Motown, Latin, Hip Hop, etc. At first “trigger”, I couldn’t play any of the riffs without my cpu sputtering and wheezing. I sent an email off to Arturia, and the next day (excellent service: they have always replied quickly via email) I got this reply:

“Brass is CPU-demanding. We have made our best to decrease the CPU load as much as we can but it is still high since it is running physical models. When using the Riff mode, up to 4 models are playing at the same time which is four times more cpu consuming than the live mode.”

I called up some riffs, muted all but one instrument, and playback wasn’t a problem. On some of the riffs, I could use two instruments. What to do about the other parts? A workaround was to export the riff as a MIDI file, import it into my sequencer program (Logic Pro), call up the appropriate number of audio instruments and select BRASS for each. I did this with a Motown preset that used trumpet, trombone, and sax. The funny thing is the Riff section (whether in standalone or AU mode in Logic) would not play this without stuttering. When I created a MIDI file for it in Logic, called up three instances of BRASS, hit “play”, the result was flawless. Hmmm….must be some powerful somethin’ in that there riff programming. I played with the notes in Logic, exported the new parts as a three-channel MIDI file, and imported it back into BRASS. It appeared as it was played in Logic.

Fig. 3: Riff Mode

The Riff Mode is simple to use. It is setup very similar to the matrix editor of sequencers like Logic, Cubase, Sonar, DP, etc. Below the matrix screen, four columns offer style (fifteen of these: pop, classical, salsa, etc.) The next column allows the selection of individual instruments or section, then on to the list of riffs, then something Arturia calls “modif”(a variation on modify, no doubt). Modif shows you whether or not the riff has been edited: draw in some notes, and a star will appear in the modif column. When the edit button is clicked, a controller-editing screen pops up under the matrix screen, along with the pencil, eraser, and other editing tools. Notes can be drawn in, lengthened, shortened, erased, etc., and the parameters from the Live Mode screen can be edited and saved as well.

The riffs sound and feel is pretty good. Sound like three players that play in the pocket, and aren’t metronomic. Riffs can be dragged onto a key on the software keyboard and then triggered from your controller keyboard. Putting a different riff on each key is like triggering Roland RPS, or sampled loops from your trusty hardware sampler back in the “old days”… Figure 3 shows the keyboard divided in two sections: Riff and Chord (also different colors.) Press down the key on the riff side and it plays as it played when auditioned in the list. Play chord structures in the right hand while triggering riffs with the left, and the key will change (the tempo remains the same). The keyboard zoning can be swapped: chords on left, riffs on the right. This is a very thoughtful feature. Left handed, right handed, it doesn’t matter, you can set this feature up to suit yourself. Speaking of tempo, the tempo can be synced to its own per riff (riff tempo), the DAW (host tempo), or fixed.

How Did It Sequence?

I did a basic eight-measure phrase, with a stereo drum loop track, a bass track, electric piano, and three instances of BRASS. Actually, a fourth BRASS track was possible, but some stuttering occurred, so I cut back to three. BRASS will fare much better on a G5; right now there is no version for the Intel Macs. That will probably be coming down the road. There are certainly plenty of blazing fast PCs on the market that can handle this program. Even so, you may find yourself having to use the sequencer program’s “freeze” function to keep even the heartiest cpu from choking if running BRASS with many audio tracks and instruments. Sound like a pain? Maybe…but the realism and expression of the sound is worth it.

Automation was a breeze; you get the option of the eight parameters from Live Mode, plus ambience amount and color. I randomly drew automation data using all the parameters on a track, and found the response to be quick and smooth; no complaints.

Summary and Conclusion

BRASS is clearly the result of much research and programming. Arturia has taken care to write an outstanding manual; they want to equip you with everything you need to be a success in creating music with this program. Yes, BRASS is a cpu hog, but the results speak for themselves: three vibrant instruments that take a significant step forward in the electronic creation of acoustic sound. This won’t replace mammoth sample libraries for film scorers, but can take a place along side those libraries, as an adjunct to those libraries. The amount of expressivity coupled with the realism of sound put this virtual instrument in a class by itself. Très bien, Arturia.