Sample based Instruments

[Son]

Hi guys,

im interested in creating sample based Instruments for Reason.

Im wondering what is the easiest way to develop sample based instruments.
I thought it would be easy to create for example a sample based piano or a a string ensemble instrument using the NN-XT Sampler.
Simply put samples into the Sampler, assign the samples to keys and maybe add some Effects (like e.g arpeggiator) to it.

But by now I think its necessary to have scripting knowledge for that, right? It is necessary to know lua. and C++ for that?

Im happy about any help, thank you in advance!

[chaosroyale]

Do you want to make an instrument to use in your own music only? Or do you want to sell the instrument?

For the former, if you are making "electronic" sounding music with arpeggiators, or treating your piano with lots of effects, Reasons Radical Piano or even the basic ID8 will be perfectly fine. Strings will sound more obviously fake but again with lots of effects you can probably find a stock sound that will be acceptable. Make a combinator including your piano sound and some of your favorite effects and use that as a base to start experimenting. Reason at its best makes it easy to combine simple instruments and effects into something like a whole new instrument.

For a "realistic" instrument, at the current time you would be much better off getting Kontakt and using a library for that. Unfortunately the NN-XT simply does not have the advanced features necessary to pull this off, which is a shame because it is half way to being a really good sampler, it just hasn't been updated since...uh, ever.

If you want to make a commercial sample library, again I would recommend learning to script for Kontakt because it will give you A: a much bigger potential market and B: a much wider range of possibilities for the instrument. Also learn UI design because some of those Kontakt library UI's are atrocious.

If you are absolutely determined to make a string or piano RE, you will need to look very carefully into the Reason SDK and see what features it will allow you to implement. The lack of any good natural-sounding sampled instruments as RE's makes me think that the limitations make this difficult, or perhaps that the market is simply too small. Remember that there are many costs for recording a professional sample library, and that studio time alone will probably become very expensive, never mind the cost of hiring a string quartet for a weekend or god forbid a whole orchestra.