Soundsources

A Soundsource can be thought of as the smallest building block of a sound and the best place to start when creating a new Patch from scratch in Trilian. The signal path of Trilian starts with its Soundsources, so those settings will affect all of the other components that come afterward and drastically influence the resulting sound.

Soundsources in Trilian are typically quite large, and can be made up of thousands of samples. A Soundsource can include chromatically sampled, velocity-switched multi-samples mapped across the full range of the keyboard, multiple channels for Mic and Direct Pickup Input (DI) sources, plus Round Robin samples, Legato samples, and articulations such as Release Noises, Slides, and other performance effects.

Larger and more complex Soundsources take a bit longer to load, but still load relatively quickly, since the STEAM Engine includes “streaming” technology to allow for playback of very large multi-samples. Streaming allows for the samples to buffer off of the computer’s hard drive in real time, instead of all of the samples having to be loaded into the computer’s physical RAM first.

Still, very large Soundsources can demand a great deal of a system’s memory resources. Trilian includes useful controls for memory management and sample thinning, which allow you to reduce the number of samples that will load with a Soundsource, giving you just the sound you need while allowing conservation of system resources.

Soundsources in Trilian are somewhat similar to “programs” in some samplers, but there are some key differences:

1. A Soundsource contains not only all of the raw samples and mapping information, such as pitch, velocity, zones, and loop points – but also Soundsource images, notes, and tags.
2. Soundsources do not include envelopes, filters, LFOs, FX, or any modulation settings—those are stored in the Patch.

For this reason, you can load a new Soundsource into a Layer without changing any of the Layer’s parameter settings. This allows you to take any Patch you like and create countless custom variations by simply changing the loaded Soundsource. The results can be dramatic!