Vibraphone & tremolo

Amen Ptah Ra wrote:

I have one question: “Will a delay added by PIANOTEQ (MODARTT) to the current tremolo effect do?”

Well, if I understood question right, my answer is no. Any solution which does not handle attack vs. sustain parts of the sound won't be realistic. As I said in real vibraphone you'll hear mostly same attack no matter if the fans are open or closed (or even if you take out resonators). And to be clear, simple solution which "waits" for sustain to put tremolo on won't work because you can have sustain pedal down chord ringing (with vibes tremolo) and then hit another bar. In this case you should still hear clear attack and same time vibes tremolo with the ringing chord tones.

This is a real challenge with sampled solutions as well. Here's a kind of a clever solution to it. "Soniccouture" sampled two sets of sound: one with fans fully open and another with fully closed and then crossfade between two. (btw I don't own this software so I cannot say how great this is in real life. At least what comes to sample library size (15GB) it can be quite impressive.)

In this link, scroll down to "True tremolo modeling" to check the idea.

https://www.soniccouture.com/en/product...ibraphone/

Chopin87 wrote:

Switching the Tremolo to mono doesn't sound similar?

Similar to what? Real vibraphone sound? No, because it affects to attack as well. If you still wanna check what I am talking about make a following test: (1) make a slow tremolo: 0.30 Hz; (2) depth: 6.0. (2) use mono (or stereo); (3) then play fast, short notes with PTQ UI-keyboard with mouse. You'll hear clearly how this sin wave modulates sound; attack volume goes up and down. Problem is that you won't get this with real one. Fast short notes sound practically same no matter if you use tremolo or not.

Basically real acoustic vibes tremolo is in fact more mono type, it certainly does not move between left and right. What it does it modulates sustain volume with sin wave. It's very simple: resonator tubes can be fully closed (lowest sustain volume) or fully opened (highest sustain volume) or anything between. With motor vibes player can choose this tremolo's speed.

Ecaroh wrote:

Hi,

There's one big problem with tremolo effect. It does not simulate well real vibraphone's motored fans which open and close those resonators. When this special kind of "tremolo" is tried to make with audio-FX it affects to attack part of the sound as well. To me this makes vibes sound very unnatural. In real life vibes sound (either listened by player or recorded, 90% times from above) attack stays practically untouched and "tremolo" affects to sustain part of the sound.

So this being a case, IMO "tremolo" should be included in model itself. Not made with FX.

I love PTQ vibes sound and its response and pedal behavior, but this "tremolo" issue should be taken care of.

This is now implemented in Pianoteq 8. See both Vibes V-M and V-B under the NOTE EFFECTS section. They are both equipped with this new feature. Thank you Ecaroh for having introduced this discussion.