Favorite Physical Modeling VSTi in 2021... and Beyond!

As concerns pitch jumps on the Seabord: In the Marco Parisi examples above he does not, however, use pitch variation to introduce vibrato, but rather varies the attack or loudness by digging in to the key, right? I think that makes a big difference. (EDIT: talking about his sax videos, but it might also play a role in his other vib style, dunno)

muratkayi said:

As concerns pitch jumps on the Seabord: In the Marco Parisi examples above he does not, however, use pitch variation to introduce vibrato, but rather varies the attack or loudness by digging in to the key, right? I think that makes a big difference.

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No, Parisi is using pitchbend (Glide). He teaches his techniques (and settings) for various VI in his online Patreon course, which I'm taking. (At this point it's just a series of prerecorded videos, 1 / month, from before the Rise 2 was released, though he told me they plan on restarting the Discord in the future.)

As I mentioned the main issue with the vibrato pitch in the video Lychee posted is that the Glide value is set much too low for pitchbend vibrato, and that's probably what's creating audible jumps. When icons are visible above the sliders that means they're set to control Glide, Slide, and Pressure instead of acting as midi cc sliders (in the latter case there are no icons above the sliders).

Ah thanks! I see, or rather I didn't, because it looked to me as if he went up and down vertically.

In general, though, what strikes me about Marco Parisi is not the perceived realism, but the massive musicality and immense flow of expressiveness. And as the Osmose has been juxtaposed to the Seabord before, I would like to post my favourite Osmose video (and one of my all time favourite music videos, I come back to it so often it is worrying) - hope I hadn't posted it here before. If so, follow my bad example and just watch it again.
The sheer top notch excellence of both the J3PO and the Parisi videos suggests that the decisive factor is the player...... dammit. Always a catch somewhere.

If you're not doing a live performance, another solution for the "unwanted tremolo from pressure variation when doing pitchbend vibrato" issue (on Seaboard / Continuum / Linnstrument) is to record the midi and edit the Pressure curve. But if your technique and settings are good enough it's usually not much of an issue IMO, as I think you can hear in the examples I posted.

muratkayi said:

The sheer top notch excellence of both the J3PO and the Parisi videos suggests that the decisive factor is the player...... dammit. Always a catch somewhere.

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Yes of course, the dexterity and inventiveness of the player is the most important element (as in all instruments).
But for the case of PM, for certain instruments we also need the appropriate tool, and Seaboard and co comes close.
For instruments as complex as strings, I even wonder if the MPE keyboard should not be coupled with a wind controller or something else.

lychee said:

Yes of course, the dexterity and inventiveness of the player is the most important element (as in all instruments).
But for the case of PM, for certain instruments we also need the appropriate tool, and Seaboard and co comes close.
For instruments as complex as strings, I even wonder if the MPE keyboard should not be coupled with a wind controller or something else.

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If you want to mimic the way that violin vibrato is played with one hand while the other hand controls dynamics independently, for monophonic sounds perhaps one could set it up in their DAW so that a Seaboard Block controls Pressure and Slide by sending midi cc while a Seaboard Rise 2 controls glide (and note value, but with Press and Slide either turned off or set to only alter parameters when above a particular value).

muratkayi said:

The sheer top notch excellence of both the J3PO and the Parisi videos suggests that the decisive factor is the player...... dammit. Always a catch somewhere.

Click to expand...

The different surfaces let you do different things – or at least more easily than others – and players adapt to that. It's a bit tricky to tell how J3PO is doing the bends on the first patch as the camera pans away but he's taking advantage of some things the Osmose supports and I guess he would approach a Seaboard performance in a different way. On the second analogue-synth patch, it looks as though he's making a lot of use of the two-key portamento to do the bends where he's not shredding rather than the sideways key wobble, which works very nicely with a patch like that where you'd have a simple fixed portamento on a regular analogue synth as you can play that really fast.

I think he's also doing a sideswipe gesture to get some pitch slides. If you strike the keys at an angle it works well on scales as it blends the intermediate notes. One thing that surprised me about the Osmose is how well the pitchbend slider at the left works (J3PO is playing one handed so doesn't bother with this in the video), but it's very good for doing guitar-like string bends as with a bit of practice, it's easier to get the bend going as you're striking the key. With the sideswipe technique you can get some neat mordents going.

Another one that the Osmose excels at is a kind of hinged bend. Because it takes a bit more force to get a pitchbend going on the key itself, with a thumb and finger on the keyboard playing a dyad (or possible within a full chord), you can bend the top and bottom notes apart really easily as you can apply more force more easily between the thumb and other finger. Or bend them in parallel using the wrist. Or a bit of a mixture between the two.

However, what you can't do is the front-to-back slide the way you can on a Seaboard or to a lesser extend on a Linnstrument. On the Osmose, slide and pressure are just two halves of a keypress, which means you generally need to reprogram any MPE patches or you wind up with the patch's response maxing out in most cases. The internal Eagenmatrix engine pulls a few tricks that makes this two-part response work a bit better.