DIGITAL Instruments: what they are, characteristics and examples

Music is an art that has accompanied humanity for a long time, as our creativity and inventiveness grows through of the ages, music has also evolved in many ways, including the way we capture it and the we share.

Let's remember that at first the only way to listen to music was directly when someone interpreted it, since the necessary artifacts did not exist to capture the sound and reproduce it. Over time, some characters engineered machines with unimaginable capabilities that gave us new possibilities and, thanks to them, music has changed along with the proximity and accessibility that we have to it.

In this article by a TEACHER we will learn about digital musical instruments, with a short introduction to the current concepts, operations and possibilities for music production.

Index

1. Digital music: a new era
2. Digital musical instruments: from analog to digital
3. Synthesizers: the foundation of digital instruments
4. VST instruments

The first inventions to capture sound and reproduce it were analog, that is, the principle of any of these machines was to be able to capture the physical phenomenon of sound (sound waves) and copy them through another medium that lasts to be able to listen to it over and over again at our whim. Thanks to these principles we obtained objects such as vinyl records (through the use of mechanical recording) and the cassettes (through electromagnetic technology).

With advances in computing, we managed to translate all our ideas into a digital interpretation. When we talk about digital information, it is necessary to understand that digital language machines work with codes, a language based on numbers. Impressively, everything we see and use on computers and digital machines (music, images, applications, etc.) is made up of numbers that are behavioral indications for the computer. We call this system "Binary system".

It is called a binary system because it is made up of two numbers: 1 and 0. When we have eight sets of binary digits, this is what we call "Byte". From there we have the rest of the digital measurements: byte (B), megabyte (MB), gigabyte (GB), terabyte (TB), etc.

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It is important to understand then that when we talk about digital information, the result is not precisely a reproduction of what we want to capture, but a informative interpretation. For example in music, we know that performers sometimes go to a studio to record their voices and instruments. Through microphones, which are another artifact that helps us capture sound, the music of their performance is captured. Until now everything continues to be analog.

Now, from this point on, the common thing today is that music recordings are transferred to a computer, where each musical take will be stored that will then be edited, mixed and mastered for distribution. In this process, a conversion from analog to digital is already required, thanks to machines and the same computer that will take this information to convert it to the binary system.

In summary: musicians perform music that is captured by an analog medium, which is then passed to a computer to become digital information that we will reproduce again to listen to as music.

We currently have an impressive number of highly accessible resources available to anyone interested in music production. In earlier times many of the analog artifacts were very large, very expensive or very rare, so self-producing music was a difficult task. Today, we can explore our creativity with our own computer, achieving software, applications and resources quite affordable.

Synthesizers

There is another important phenomenon in the history of invention in music and this is electricity. As in many other areas, humanity managed to take a natural resource to shape as it pleased. The machine capable of converting electricity into sound is the "synthesizer" (You can find more information in the article "Electronic musical instruments").

The synthesizer gave us the option to produce and invent new sounds, which do not come from any analog musical instrument and we can even manipulate them to make them look a lot like a real instrument. This is how the electronic musical instruments that we know today.

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Today synthesizers are a very important part of the modern music complement, however, when being sounds produced "artificially" it is not strange to hope that it does not provide us with the musical sensation that we seek. Once again, the technological advances They allowed us to devise a way to get closer to the reality of sound through computers and we began to use technology "VST" o “Virtual Studio Technology (from the English that means Virtual Studio Technology).

Most VST instruments are based on the principle of "Samplers", which is when we take a series of samples from an instrument to be able to reproduce it digitally in another medium, such as a keyboard connected to the computer. The process of creating samples from an instrument is exhaustive because it requires the recording of all (or most) the notes of an instrument including the intensity variations with which they are played. Despite such effort, it is thanks to this that later, through programming, we can obtain tools to compose music through the computer. A sample compilation of one or more specific instruments is called a VST “library”. There are also plugins for sound effects that recreate real spaces (in terms of reverb) or to manipulate the sound (compressors, limiters, equalizers among others.)

Thanks to VST libraries and components, we can create works for a full symphony orchestra, get close to making a work for cello without knowing how to play it, or include exotic instruments out of our reach in our musical works. They are also extremely useful for exploring what a piece might sound like before recording it with real instruments.

Many believe that real and live music has no comparison, that despite how much we can bring the creation of music closer to technology, resources and human warmth can never be replaced. While this may be true, it is thanks to digital musical instruments that many amateurs as professionals, they can have access to a tool that will help them expand their horizons in creativity musical.

If you liked reading this article by a TEACHER and have learned about music and musical instruments digital, we invite you to leave a comment and to continue exploring the rest of the articles we have for offer you.

If you want to read more articles similar to Digital musical instruments, we recommend that you enter our category of Musical instruments.