ThumbJam Forum

Harp, clarinet, harpsicord

We've got all these great Indian scales. A sitar should be in the works, yes?

Also, Zoe's cello sample is great, but shouldn't we have vibrato from shaking instead of the sample itself? Shouldn't the saxophone sample last as long as we consider believable?

Loving this app!

Well, in the special case of bowed strings, a skilled player can produce a much more convincing sounding vibrato with the actual instrument vs. in-app. That's why I decided to go with that for these instruments. I did try it both ways, and this is much more satisfying. I may yet release vibrato-free versions of the strings for download in the future.

The sax samples are not looped, so that's roughly how long the player held the notes (give or take). Same for all the horns.

Sitar is definitely on the must-sample list.

One instrument I use a lot is bass. I find the electric bass to be weak. It sounds like a keyboard. The plucked bass is much better. Would be good to have a better bass sample, maybe even a 'funk slap bass'. Accurate sounding bass seems to be difficult to make as even full size keyboards don't have realistic sounding bass samples.

I agree, the electric bass samples I made are not satisfying. Really, there is no excuse because I'm actually a bass player. I'll work on capturing some better ones. Aside from a slap bass, what kind of sound are you looking for? Something more aggressive, something more round and P-bassy, something else... ?

Any bass that sounds realistic. Funk/rock/Motown. Another sample that is not great is acoustic guitar.
I'm a guitarist and it sounds more like a harp. Again, I have never heard a good acoustic guitar emulation. Very hard to do.

Don't know if this is just my setup, but when playing through amplification, the drums volume seems to be lower than a lot of the instruments, even with the volume at max.

This can be worked around of course by lowering the volume of the other instruments, but ideally it would be much easier if I could just raise the drum volume a little more.

Also on the new instrument topic...

I think I would enjoy contributing to the future collection of user-created instruments. I have a couple hugh-tracey kalimbas that I could sample if anyone is interested in that type of sound

Jessie:
The Electric Guitar you provided is a winner for sure.

But a broader selection of electric guitars I know would be most welcome.

I myself would really like to hear a guitar tone something like the one Carlos Santana has on Black Magic Woman— it has a great riff tone. And/or maybe the big chimey sound the Edge has on a lot of U2 songs.

Just curious if it would be possible to add a distortion effect(s) in thumbJam, that way if you had a selection of clean guitar samples, we all could then dial in the edge as needed/desired?

LOL! Sorry Jesse, I guess this is the (happy?) curse of having created a HIT APP!