| EQ and verb won't solve your "fakeness" problem.
I started playing trumpet about 4 yrs ago and it has tought me a great deal about brass instruments and how they are played. It also has opened my ears when listening to brass recordings and how they fit into a track and add to a song. Will I ever be a brass player?......No. Learning to play has been a ton of fun though and has actually made me a stronger singer with better pitch. You can buy a used horn for $100 and really learn a lot about how to write "fake" brass parts, or better yet.....real ones.
Brass instruments have a huge dynamic range that can go from soft to loud very quickly. Try programming volume swells and changes instead of static note volume. The second big thing with brass, that makes it sound so "Human" is the fact that almost every not played is never perfectly in pitch and has some amount of vibrato. A note can start without any vibrato and progress to heavy and then back again. A ribbon slider or the D-beam on my Fantom-x keyboard are great for controlling this. I think Kurzweil K2600 really does a nice job with "Human" vibrato control and modulation with their sliders and mod wheels. Lastly you want to consider the "Glissando" thing where each note is probably approached from higher or lower than the pitch you are going for. The trouble with sampling brass is really the same problem with sampling any string or voice instrument. There are too many variables. Drums and Keyboards are mostly "note-on, note-off" and velocity which makes them easy.
When you think about programming all this stuff to sound human, and taking hours to do it, you may want to just consider calling a good player to play your parts that you have already written....charted in Bb. |