Nord User Forum

This one was a very long time coming. I've had this in my head informally for years, and it's taken me many months to get it realized.

Medley of two American standards: It's Only A Paper Moon (composed by Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg and Billy Rose) and Tuxedo Junction (Erskine Hawkins, Bill Johnson and Julian Dash).

The goal behind this recording was to challenge myself to create near-authentic wind and acoustic instrument parts. I tried to emulate how these instruments might be played by real musicians to achieve something a bit more than just a mechanical sound. Particularly for the horns, all dynamics and articulations were manually created. I'd give myself a C+ on it.

The entire guitar part was recorded manually. I was looking for Freddie Green style strumming, but could not find MIDI patterns that I liked. Instead, I voiced and played the rhythm and solo freehand. This helped achieve the slight inaccuracies in timing for a more realistic sound.

Same mindset was used for the bass. I wanted to achieve some of the nuances and realism an actual bass player would bring to a recording session.

Bass: Orange Tree Samples Core Bass Pear
Drums: Kontakt Abby Road 60’s Drummer with various patterns added from Band-In-A-Box
Clarinet: VG Jazz Clarinet
Trumpet: Kontakt Session Horns Trumpet
Guitar: Kontakt Picked Nylon, manual playing (no auto rhythm)

Piano: Nord Piano Library Pearl Upright: Yes indeed, this had the perfect personality for the recording. I auditioned every piano sample and library I had and felt the Pearl was the right instrument.

Recorded, mixed & mastered with Cubase Elements 14; final volume finishing with Audacity

Effects:
Arturia Pre TriA
Arturia Comp VCA-65
TDR Nova GE EQ
Brainworx bx_console Focusrite SC channel strip (drum track only)
Reverb: Native Instruments Raum, modified Subtle Acoustic preset
Arturia BusFORCE and Slate Digital Fresh Air were used on the Master Track.

I limited the use of effects gear to mimic the limitations of a real studio with minimal outboard gear. I'm rarely pursuing a super modern sound, as I like a more vintage air. All instruments use the same reverb buss at various levels to simulate all musicians in the same room at once.

Hopefully you're entertained one way or another!

Sounds great! Thank you for sharing.

Nice work Mike. Love the standards

Great playing. Specially the trumpet. How do you have played the trumpet on the keyboard?

Merlimau wrote: ↑22 Mar 2025, 21:42 Great playing. Specially the trumpet. How do you have played the trumpet on the keyboard?

Thanks. To answer your question - it’s mostly cheating in a way.

The first thing is to try to learn how a musician plays that particular instrument. To use the trumpet as an example, Jazz trumpet players will use bends, vibrato and slides in a certain style. You want to try to learn those stylings and figure out how to emulate them. There are also attack elements, legatos, fall offs, etc. that need to be copied.

The VST instruments allow you to map an instrument’s behaviors to the controllers and key switches. If you are not familiar, key switches are keys on the keyboard outside of the instrument’s normal playing range where you can assign articulation triggers. For example you can assign a “slide up” articulation to key C-1. When you hold C-1 down while playing the actual musical note elsewhere on the keyboard, the software will invoke that articulations for that note. Continuous controllers such as the mod wheel can control aspects such as dynamics and expression.

The actual recording of the instrument is done in multiple passes. On the first pass, I play only the notes into the DAW in real-time, which captures the MIDI note information. On the second pass, I correct the notes that do not sound like trumpet (of which there are usually a lot) by going through them one by one.

The next several passes involve looking at each note or phrase and adding the controller data and key switches to add the expressions and articulations. I repeat this last step until I arrive upon a rendition that I think sounds decent. The track is then blended in with the rest of the instruments and corrected until it sounds like it works.

Apologies that this is such a long answer, but I hope it helps answer your question.