Steel Tongue Drum Virtual Instrument Creation
This was created for a class assignment by my team and I for my Instrument Design module.
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We were tasked to choose an instrument from the ones available to us and my team chose a steel tongue drum which looks like this:
This is not the actual image of the steel tongue drum we used, but it is very similar. Image credit here.
Then, we did some research on the drum in order to gain a better understanding about it and it's musical properties. According to what we found, it is part of the idiophone family whereby the sound is being produced from the vibrations of the drum being struck. It has a metallic timbre and our drum can produce the pitches of G3 to D5 in the key of D major.
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Then, we looked at the appropriate microphones and miking techniques that we can use to record our drum. We originally settled for either an AKG C414 or the Neumann KM 184 microphone however due to resource constraints we ended up using the Shure SM58 microphone. The microphone would then be placed off axis from each note of the tongue steel drum to roll off the high ends and make the sound smoother.
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Besides this, we used a given mapping document to do all our planning such as the notes to be played/sounds to be made and the method we are playing the notes/making the sound.
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Here is our finalized mapping document:
Once our pre-recording document was done, we were ready for recording. We set the instrument up in a quiet room with our microphone attached to our audio interface and Pro Tools. For each note and playing method we had, we played it in 3 different velocities: soft, medium, loud such that it would add more realism when the person uses a keyboard to play the sounds and when they hit the key softly, then a softer sound will be played as opposed to a louder sound being played when they key is hit harder. Then, once done, I edited the samples with my teammate and did digital signal processing to the sample clips such as noise reduction to reduce any background noise that may have been picked up during recording.
This is what our session looks like:
Next, I exported all the clips and named them according to their pitch, our playing style as well as the velocity it was played at. We opened up Kontakt 5, a virtual instrument software which allows us to access ready made virtual instruments and even make our own virtual instrument, and created a new project file.
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Then, we mapped all the sounds in according to their note and velocity, which allowed us to result in this:
This is our mapping for the notes played normally with a soft mallet
This is our mapping for the notes played with a pitch bend with the soft mallet
This is our mapping for the notes played staccato with the soft mallet.
This is our mapping for the unpitched notes played using the mallet or our hands, such as scraping or tapping.
These are the 4 layers that can be played by connecting the computer to a MIDI keyboard and each layer is mapped to a key switch whereby if you press the note on the keyboard, it will switch to the specific layer.
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Key switching map guide:
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Soft Mallet Normal - C1 note
Soft Mallet Staccato - D1 note
Pitch Bend - E1 note
Unpitched - F1 note
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This is our final product of the Kontakt 5 file: