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 | | | | Jan31Written by:Bruce Richardson
Monday, January 31, 2000 6:00 PM  Here's a library that got extraordinary amounts of airplay on A Christmas Carol. The GigaHarp and Christmas go together like cabernet sauvignon, chocolate, and naughty supermodels. Classic winning combos.
This is a first-class library. Starting with KM-84s and Neve preamps through top shelf 24-bit converters, the path has never been shorter to a well recorded harp that's ready for serious programming. Each string has been sampled at four pluck levels, two harmonics, and a damping / muffling release trigger by a world-renowned, innovative harpist. You can easily control these sounds in realtime, and produce an absolutely genuine harp track in a single pass. The mapping is excellent, on par with the quality of the sounds themselves.
 Gary Garritan
For instance, the melodic harp comes in two levels of sensitivity to velocity. You take your pick as to which has the better mapping for your touch or your mix. Once you've loaded your choice, you'll notice that each key is mapped nicely to the four levels of "pluck." Playing melodies with these samples alone gives you detailed control of your virtual harp. But now reach over and try the mod wheel. Halfway up, you'll find the first of the harmonic plucks, which still contains some fundamental, but gives you a sharper, thinner sound. Push the wheel to its wide open position for a more extreme, guitar-like harmonic. You can roll the wheel up to pop one of these babies out, then roll it back down to continue with the plucks. This is all very seamless sounding, thanks to a fine job of mapping. In moments, you can play lines that are stunning in realism and sheer sonic quality.
Strengths and Quirks
There are little idiosyncrasies here and there. Some of the loud plucks (try A5, for instance) are funky as a dog. Matter of fact, in some phrases, it was a little too real for me...I ended up knocking back velocity for a better behaved sample that wouldn't call so much attention to itself.
Ah, a soapbox moment is coming, I can feel it. Sorry, library developers, I'm going to wear this point out. Keep in mind that funky is great if it happens to be one note in a phrase. But what if a user wants to develop a piece in your "funky" key? Suddenly that funkiness is working against you and your library. Samples with individual distinction are the bomb. Samples that go over the top give away the illusion, though. It is an incredibly fine line.
Specifically, I knocked down the velocity on those A5s when too many popped up in a piece. I like it in some cases, but in others I cringed.
But that's a picky little item, not a deal breaker. And hang on folks, there's more. Sure, you can play plucked style passages with amazing realism, but what about glissandos?
We all know the market is full of harp glissando samples, but we also know they're not easy to manipulate. Bottom line, you're stuck with what you're given, and you must shoehorn it into your work as best you can.
So what about rolling your own glissandos? Well, even on a melodic harp library as good as the GigaHarp, one can't really get genuine-sounding glissandos without Herculean programming effort.
Here's why. Harp glissandos are not simple arpeggios. Every pedal combination yields a different sequence of notes up and down the harp. Some pitches raise while others lower as you change keys with the pedals. Each key presents you with a different pattern of consecutive unison strings. It is each key's unique pattern of double-unisons that differentiates a realistic gliss from a keyboard player's imitation.
Gary Garritan has given us a great shortcut to deal with this phenomenon. With GigaHarp, the user receives a set of MIDI sequences. These sequences contain controller information that sets the GigaHarp glissando patches to perfectly reproduce the sound of a harp glissando in any key. All you must do, after playing the controller information into GigaSampler, is to run your fingers up and down the white keys. Whatever key you've invoked with the controllers will sound.
For instance, to realize a typical orchestral part containing both specific melodic information and glisses, you would set up two MIDI tracks on two different channels in your sequence, one for the melodic part and the other for the glissandos. Sequence the melodic information first, leaving out the glisses. Now, analyze the key of each gliss, and paste the appropriate key's MIDI sequence from your GigaHarp disc. You can import many of these per track, use one for every change of chord until you've pasted one in front of each spot where you'll gliss.
Now record your second pass through the sequence, glissing on your controller's white keys only. The information you've imported and pasted from the GigaHarp CD will change the string mappings in realtime and give you an authentically voiced glissando. From there, simply polish and edit the part, then blend it into your mix. You'll be impressed with the results.
Weaknesses
I mentioned the "funky" notes. I love them but other options would be great, too. Still, I solved the problem very easily when it popped up. Just reduce the velocity of a note that's too wild for your taste. You'll drop to the next lower sample, and the problem will be solved. In your final mix, you can boost the volume of that single note with an envelope if necessary.
I've heard some comments from users that they couldn't get a realistic sound from GigaHarp. I suspect they did not know how to program with it, because I found that I could create harp parts that were indistinguishable from the real thing to my ears. I think that even a harpist could completely buy into a well constructed part on this instrument.
What may be throwing the detractors is a misunderstanding of the harp's complexity. If you really want to pull off REAL, even with this library, get ready to put some effort into it. The instrument has a complex technique that can't just be farted out in one take.
There's also that nasty issue of people believing that great results can be had by just mixing the sampler's output in MIDI and calling it a day. Half an effort will get you half a mix. Use your tools, boys and girls, use your tools.
Conclusion
I found that reasonable effort produced stunning results in every case. Even the straight melodic harp, played with no tricky programming, will get you a sound that's top-shelf. Try a little high quality compression on the tracks if you want to smooth out the dynamic response while accentuating the range of color.
And frankly, on the big Christmas production we used to test this library, the GigaHarp saved my butt. There were so many times when we were at a standstill, and one of us would snap to, and say, "Hey, let's try the harp!" Worked every time.
We used it in a trio with flute and acoustic guitar. People wanted to know who the harp player was. What can you say?
One of the things I've been dying to try is completely wanking out the sound of the harp with some serious effects and distortion. I'll let you know how it turns out.
If you're doing orchestral work, this library is a must have tool. It can carry a lot of weight on a wide spectrum of projects. Highly recommended.
For more information visit http://www.nemesysmusic.com
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