SWAM Instruments provide the control every musician needs.
Have you ever composed or played with a sample library? The way a sax or violin sound evolves is the result of studio recording. It’s a kind of “picture”, taken from another musician playing a sax or a violin for you. You can combine it with other sounds, tweak it, and get inspired from it, but because someone else has recorded it for you (even if very well), can you really express yourself totally with it?
SWAM is not just a great technology for modeling acoustic instruments: it is a philosophy of making music with digital instruments. Our aim at Audio Modeling is not only to replicate accurately the sound of an acoustic instrument. We also want to provide its behaviour – how the instrument reacts under the hands of the musician – and to recreate the bidirectional feeling and link between the artist and the instrument.
Now that you have the power of the SWAM acoustic instrument model, how can you interact with it? How can you best express your musical ideas on the digital instrument? You need one or more controllers.
Using the MIDI protocol, controllers communicate with computers and digital instruments. They are able to tweak the instruments’ parameters that affect the sound generation. There are a huge number of MIDI controllers on the market but we would like to focus especially on continuous controllers.
A continuous controller is the hero of the SWAM engine instruments story because it is capable of sending real-time messages, for example, to set the expression (dynamic) level, the bow or breath pressure, or the speed of the vibrato. The result of this is that the musician gets the natural behaviour he or she has in mind.
Here are the controllers we will describe in more detail over the coming weeks:
- Expression Pedal
- After touch & Pressure
- Breath & Wind Controller with “Bite” feature option
- Knobs and Faders
- Ribbon and Pads
- Modulation Wheel
- Pitch Bend Joystick
- Accelerometers on Rings shape controllers and other devices