Sampling for Hauptwerk – Tutorials

I’ve often thought it would be helpful for folks who are interested in sampling to understand what it is we do when we prepare organ samples for Hauptwerk, and so I’ve been documenting some of my processes via screen capture and captions/narration. These won’t be posted in order of production, but I will organize in correct order.


Noise Reduction

Noise reduction is the most crucial first step in editing. Pay special attention to how the character of what is being removed changes (auditioned by clicking the “Keep Residue” button and adjusting noise bias). You can’t hear it very well except on the first pass of NR on the video, but rest assured that if you have headphones on and you’re editing, you WILL hear it.

Some notes for the low frequency cut step – this was an 8′ stop, so the bottom octave rolls off at 65hZ, octave 2 at ~129hZ and so on. ALWAYS check that lowest note of the octave using the bypass to compare in order to verify you’re not damaging the character of the stop – sometimes there ARE sympathetic resonances below the frequency of the stop. Also, remember that the lowest octave of a 4′ stop would bottom out at ~129hz, 2′ at 256~258hZ, etc. You will notice that as you get higher up and you can safely remove more rumble, the top octaves may only take 1-2  NR passes instead of the 4 that this example took on the bottom of a rather noisy 8′ octave.


Setting Releases

HW needs to know where the pipe stops speaking, so that it can crossfade to a release.  One of the trickiest things is getting this right – if you put the release marker in the wrong spot, it will sound wrong. Some people like to try to do this with automation – I prefer to listen to every release and do it by hand… this also gives me another quality-control step.

You can save space by deleting everything in front of the release marker on your short/med releases, if you wish – it does make the downloads and install files smaller. Obviously, you shouldn’t delete everything in front of the release marker for the sustain samples… that would be bad 🙂 (and you won’t have any sustain!)