Original SoundFont cymbal?

[Herty]

Okay, anyone who knows me knows that I'm not an immensely experienced OSF composer.

One thing that's always got to me is cymbal crashes... How would I go about replicating them in OSF?

I've tried everything from pigs to yoshis to masses of boats but I can't get anything particularly accurate.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[bally]

It all really depends on what kind of crash you're talking about and how much you want it to stand out. (not to mention if there's other percussive stuff going on that might have to get cut out in order to make room for it) There are a million different ways of going about it.

You'll never get a really big sound out of using boats (A to D-flat typically), but I doubt you'll get anything else to actually sound good.

[JohnFreeman]

there's really no way to get a good cymbal sound in the original soundfont. When I'm approaching creating a cymbal crash, I try to think of the purpose it serves in the song: do I want it to help the song flow from one phase to another? In that case, keep it simple, just a stack of A-E boats should work. If the cymbal crash actually demands attention, you need to make sure it gets it. I start out with a snare hit (I like high octave A#, G, E, middle octave C) and immediately follow it with a A-E stack of boats. Follow it up with a quieter A-E stack a few bars later to carry out the sound. If it's still not loud enough, add some low mushrooms to the attack of the cymbal. There's no good way to replicate the sound of a cymbal in MPC, but you can usually replicate the function of a cymbal pretty well. It's more of an art than a science, though, so fool around with it a lot until you've found something that sounds right.