Concertina instrument samples

[SteveS]

Anyone know of any freely publicly available instrument sound samples of concertinas?  

 

Thanks

[Don Taylor]

The SF2 sound font that has been in my sig for years now (see below) contains a set of sounds sampled from a baritone EC courtesy of Phil Taylor (no relation). 

 

If you want the raw .wav files  then you could extract them with the free Polyphone sound font editor:

https://www.polyphone-soundfonts.com/

 

However, not every note is sampled, far from it, as sound font player software interpolates for missing notes.  You might be better off installing Musescore and then installing Phil's sound font in Musescore.  You can then play each note in turn and capture the sound. 

 

Warning, some the really high notes are a bit iffy as the software occassionally interprets the note a fifth higher than than it should because the second (I think it is) overtone is really strong in the sound from a concertina. 

[David Barnert]

Phil Taylor (creator of the now-defunct BarFly) created one from digital recordings of his Wheatstone and Don Taylor (no relation to Phil) salvaged it (Phil’s site no longer exists) and tweaked the tuning. Both the tuned and original versions are provided by Don here:

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KZ1EPAueS-xBiBLDeMVfa3Fvno85UHHg?usp=sharing

[David Barnert]

Don and I posted at the same time. I hadn’t seen his when I hit “submit reply.”

[Don Taylor]

1 minute ago, David Barnert said:

Don and I posted at the same time. I hadn’t seen his when I hit “submit reply.”

Me too!

[SteveS]

Thanks everyone.

I'm in the process of arranging a couple of piano scores for a concertina quartet (my first such arrangement so I'm on a steep learning curve) using Musescore and it would be nice to have concertina sounds on playback rather than relying on either terrible MIDI free reed sounds or strings - I'd like to hear something that is closer to how the final product might sound.

 

And any tips on arranging for a concertina quartet would be gratefully received.  I've started a new thread.

Edited February 12, 2022 by SteveS

[David Barnert]

43 minutes ago, SteveS said:

...using Musescore

MuseScore can easily work with the sound fonts Don and I referred to, above.

[SteveS]

29 minutes ago, David Barnert said:

MuseScore can easily work with the sound fonts Don and I referred to, above.

thanks - i'll give it a go

[SIMON GABRIELOW]

I may seem naive on this mater of SAMPLES; but would it possible to simply have people give a physical sound recording of their actual concertina [all notes up scales[ etc.. then you can use that ? or put into computer afterwards; then they could say what kind of instrument it its to help identify it..? just wondered.

[David Barnert]

21 minutes ago, SIMON GABRIELOW said:

I may seem naive on this mater of SAMPLES; but would it possible to simply have people give a physical sound recording of their actual concertina [all notes up scales[ etc.. then you can use that ? or put into computer afterwards; then they could say what kind of instrument it its to help identify it..? just wondered.

 

If I am understanding your question correctly, that’s what a sound font IS (or at least one way to make a sound font). This one certainly is. Phil Taylor digitally recorded each note of his concertina and used those samples to create the font.

 

28 minutes ago, SteveS said:

thanks - i'll give it a go

 

Here is an example of MuseScore playing my (Hayden Duet concertina) arrangement of “South Australia” using Don’s tuned version of Phil’s Concertina Sound Font. It doesn’t quite sound like natural live playing (and I wouldn’t inflict it on my Morris Dancers), but it sounds more like a concertina than anything else the software might come up with. I could make it sound more natural by adding sliver rests for articulation, but that would make the notation more difficult for a human musician to read.

 

[Aside: Just noticed Don and Phil, the (unrelated) Taylor “brothers” were also the names of the Everly Brothers.]

Edited February 12, 2022 by David Barnert
clarification

[David Barnert]

For comparison, I just found this video of me playing the same arrangement of the same tune.

 

 

[Don Taylor]

6 minutes ago, David Barnert said:

For comparison, I just found this video of me playing the same arrangement of the same tune.

This post from last year has David playing SA indoors, a bit easier to hear his articulations:

https://www.concertina.net/forums/index.php?/topic/24029-south-australia/

 

David plays the tune with lots of stacatto notes which will not sound in the Musescore unless you mark up all of the articulations on the score, then the score gets a bit busy for amateur musicians like me to read.

 

FWIW.  I think of SA as a song sung mostly legato and a bit slower than the Morris version so the Musescore version does not sound so strange to me, but if you want a nice 'lumpy' Morris sound then you need the articulations.

[SteveS]

51 minutes ago, SIMON GABRIELOW said:

I may seem naive on this mater of SAMPLES; but would it possible to simply have people give a physical sound recording of their actual concertina [all notes up scales[ etc.. then you can use that ? or put into computer afterwards; then they could say what kind of instrument it its to help identify it..? just wondered.

Sampling my concertinas is an option.  My recording facility isn't setup at the moment so I was looking for another source of samples.

[David Barnert]

9 minutes ago, Don Taylor said:

This post from last year has David playing SA indoors, a bit easier to hear his articulations:

https://www.concertina.net/forums/index.php?/topic/24029-south-australia/

 

Thanks. I’d forgotten about that.

 

10 minutes ago, Don Taylor said:

David plays the tune with lots of stacatto notes which will not sound in the Musescore unless you mark up all of the articulations on the score, then the score gets a bit busy for amateur musicians like me to read.

 

FWIW.  I think of SA as a song sung mostly legato and a bit slower than the Morris version so the Musescore version does not sound so strange to me, but if you want a nice 'lumpy' Morris sound then you need the articulations.

 

Exactly, but perhaps a topic for a different thread.

[fred v]

I use ABCMUS for my practice and use the Oboe for the closest sound of a concertina. I have downloaded the sound font mentioned but I cannot figure out how to add it to ABCMUS. Can anyone advise???

Fred

[Don Taylor]

Windows stopped supporting midi natively many releases ago, maybe Win95?  What is left in there is old, moribund code that uses some very poor quality samples.

 

Musescore on Windows works because it uses its own midi player, Fluidsynth, which allows for the addition of new audio sample files - sound fonts.  All of the Windows ABC players that I know of use the vestigal midi player that was in Windows decades ago so you cannot add a sound font file to them.

 

You could contact the developer of ABCMUS and ask him to incorporate Fluidsynth into ABCMUS.  This would be a non-trivial request but both Fluidsynth and Musescore are open-source programs so that might be a place to start.  However, I would not hold my breath while I waited for him to implement Fluidsynth in ABCMUS.

 

You can easily import abc files into Musescore and play them back.  This will give you a lot more control over the playback than you get with most abc players - looping, speed, transposition, volume, metronome, lead-in and, of course, much better sounds including a sampled concertina. 

 

But Musescore does not provide the libary (song book) functions that are in abc players.  I use both, I just cut and paste the abc text into the abc add-on that comes built-in to Musescore.  However, I often now mostly just cut and paste the abc text directly from a web page (e.g. the Session) and past that into Musescore and then save the resulting Musescore file.

Edited February 14, 2022 by Don Taylor

[fred v]

Thanks Don. I'll look at Musescore. I run ABC on a MAC with a partition with Win XP on it just for ABC and my old Autocad program.

[David Barnert]

2 hours ago, fred v said:

Thanks Don. I'll look at Musescore. I run ABC on a MAC with a partition with Win XP on it just for ABC and my old Autocad program.

 

I would think most Mac/abc users these days are using EasyABC, although it can’t handle sound fonts. Since the demise of BarFly, I’m not aware of any abc apps (for any platform) that can use them. Musescore seems a reasonable (if indirect) way to get your abc files played using a sound font.