the recursor

sampled toy keyboard	2008-11-25 02:06 UTC
We got Bethany a toy musical keyboard when she was little, and we still have it. It has a "demo" button that plays "Venus", which drives everyone nuts, but Sophie insists on pushing it (as did Bethany, but no so much Josiah) repetitively. It has a piano patch which sounds totally fake, but there's a "harmony" button that adds a harmonizing note to every note you play. I always thought it sounded kind of nice and Christmas-y, but the youngster would always push the "demo" button before I could play much - and Sophie (as well as Bethany when she was that age) doesn't seem that interested in playing the notes -- just the demo button. So, to get around that, I plugged the headphone-out/line-out into my audio interface, and recorded each note until it faded out (there are 32 of them). Then, I applied an automated low pass filter to try and reduce the yucky distortion sound that became more evident as the notes faded out, and then broke the long recording up into a file for each note. With the sample files, I created a sample set using the EXS24 editor that comes with Logic. Here's zip file with the samples and the exs file that describes the software "instrument". If you have the right software and know what you're doing, you can hook it up. The file is about 42 megs.
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