Ethan Winer explains why he chose the SoundBlaster Live card as the core for his new setup, and along the way he describes many useful tips for creating and editing samples in the popular SoundFont format.

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Striving for New Lows
By Ethan Winer
Contributing Editor
ProRec.com

Several months ago I was mixing a symphony I had sequenced for a local composer when I noticed the French horns were fuzzy in one channel. It was that unmistakable sound of a bad connection, the kind that goes away when you wiggle the wires. I have a fairly complex setup comprising seven external synthesizers, a computer with dozens of audio programs and two sound cards, a rack full of outboard effects, and a 48-input mixer to combine all the outputs.

The fuzzing horn patch was coming from my Yamaha SY77 synthesizer, so I reached in the back and unplugged and reseated both stereo pairs of phone plugs. The fuzz was still there, so I fiddled with, in turn, the wires from the SY77 to the noise gates, the noise gates to the mixer, and the mixer to the power amp. Nothing helped, and all I could do was ignore it for the time being. By the next day, when I was finishing the mix, the fuzz had disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared. But this experience confirmed what I'd long been considering: It was time to abandon my aging gear and start working entirely within the computer.

There are many good reasons to consolidate all recording and mixing--both MIDI and audio--into a single computer. Modern software samplers, audio recording programs, and plug-in effects are very high quality, and computers are finally powerful enough to handle an entire mix in real time. Keeping everything in the computer eliminates all hum and noise caused by ground loops and flaky cables, avoids the hiss inherent in most older outboard gear, and allows complete mixdown recall and automation. And with current computers you can handle 24 or more audio tracks--you don't need to buy three ADATs or an expensive stand-alone hard disk recorder.

Using a computer-based sampler also simplifies patch editing because there's only one operating system to learn. With my seven synthesizers, making even a small change to a patch requires a frustrating trip to the owner's manual and time wasted squinting at a tiny LCD display. Compare that to using a single computer program that presents an attractive interface on a large video monitor. Further, a computer-based sampler is easily upgraded with new sounds, as opposed to the latest must-have hardware synthesizer that must be purchased again and again. Perhaps most important of all, with a computer you can mix directly to a Wave file and burn that to a CD as the final product--without ever leaving the digital domain.

Choosing a Sampler

I already own IQS's excellent SAWPlus32 multitrack recording program, Sound Forge 4.5 for Wave file editing and mastering, a slew of DirectX plug-ins, and the excellent DreamStation software emulation of classic analog synthesizers. All I needed was to play back sampled sounds from my sequencer. I tried several shareware software samplers but found them inadequate, and I rejected the high-end commercial programs because they all use copy protection.

Because I already have a Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live card, it was an easy decision to use its built-in sample-playback capability. The SB Live sounds great, it is powerful and inexpensive, and it has one huge advantage over software synthesizers: The sound generation is handled entirely by hardware on the card itself. So there is no latency delay, and there's no load on the computer's CPU or hard drives even when playing a very complex MIDI sequence. Further, the Live card has two complete 16-channel synthesizers, for a total of 32 separate instruments and 256-note polyphony.

Many people wrongly believe that the SoundBlaster Live card is cheesy, based on the puny 2 MB GM sample set installed by default. However, I have done careful listening tests of this sound card and found the fidelity to be excellent. Samples played back by the SB Live are based on Wave files, so whatever quality is in the original recording comes through exactly. You can allocate up to half your system RAM to hold sample banks, offering the potential for truly professional results on a well-endowed computer. My sound card test is described in a separate article on my web site. Also see Pete Leoni's article Is it Live, or is it Sampleblaster? here on ProRec that discusses other aspects of using a SoundBlaster Live card as a sampler.

As a typical project studio owner I don't need 8 or 16 sound card inputs and outputs. I use MIDI to sequence as much as possible of a project, and then overdub live instruments one at a time as mono or stereo audio tracks in SAW. For the occasions when I do need to record more inputs at once, I have a second sound card, a CardD Plus, for a total of four simultaneous channels.

Unless you record entire bands or need to transfer many tracks at one time to an external tape or hard disk recorder, most project studios need only a SoundBlaster Live and possibly one additional sound card. And if you really do need many input and output channels, you can buy a multi-port interface for that and still use a Live card for its sample playback.

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