Tweaking vibrato and treble in a violin soundfont

• FG 4 0

  Message from Frank Gregorio on …
  Hi. I'm new to the forum so please excuse if this question was already answered in an earlier post. I could not find it in the forum.
  I am using a large .sf2 soundfont that comes with the MuseScore music notation program. One of its 128+ instruments is a solo violin. In listening to its built-in synthesizer playing a violin piece and comparing it to a real violin recording of the same piece, it turns out to be a quite good violin, except for two components:
  
  1. The violin breaks into a vibrato a bit too quickly. A real violin player usually does not begin vibrating his/her fingers until the note has played for a second or two. The MuseScore soundfont starts its vibrato almost instantly. I need to delay the start of the violin vibrato for a second longer.
  
  2. The sound is a bit harsh. It needs to mellow down in all the samples, possibly by boosting mid-tones and base or turning down treble in an equalizer, then applying it to only the samples in the violin voice, not all the voices in the entire soundfont.
  
  Can Polyphone fix one or both of these issues? If so, I honestly tried to understand in the manual what controls to use in the program, but I am frankly lost. I know nothing ... nothing about audio tweaking.
  
  If it can be done, what controls fix vibrato delay, and how do i select only the violin part from a 128+ instrument .sf2 file to apply it to?
  Can I tweak an equalizer to lower the treble, then apply its effects only to the violin instrument? If not, is there some other control in Polyphone that will ease the harshness of a violin tone?
  
  Thanks so much in advance.
• 57 0

  Message from Michael on …
  To answer your question about making the instrument less bright - that can be done quite easily with the low-pass filter. Go to the instrument tab and look for Filter, cutoff (Hz). That refers to a lowpass-filter with a roll-off of 12 dB per octave: the sound frequencies above the desired amount will be decreases in amplitude with 12 dB per octave. Values within Global affects all samples of the instrument, otherwise the value affects for the samples individually. You can see what it does on these images representing a spectrogram views of a cello sound when a lowpass-filter from 4000 Hz with a 12 dB roll-off is applied.
  
  https://images2.imagebam.com/8b/55/96/81ff291372328682.png " />
  https://images2.imagebam.com/65/9f/c2/af4ab61372328686.png " />
  Start with a value of 4000 or 5000 into Global and find out if it is what you want. otherwise you'll have to use another value.
  
  About the vibrato. In general the vibrato of a sampled violin is recorded into the sound file itself. Check if that's the case by listening to the samples.
  
  Otherwise the vibrato is programmed into the instrument-settings. And then it's possible to delay the moment from when the vibrato appears.
  
  A vibrato can be programmed with Vib LFO or Mod LFO into the instrument-settings. Delay refers to the moment when the vibrato starts.
• Message from Michael on …
  To understand the possibilities of soundfonts maybe this tutorial can help you.
  
  http://www.hammersound.net/files/ViennaPdf.zip 

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