A Free Virtual Flute Saves the Day...er, Night

A friend was jetting off to Japan in the morning and offered to take copies of my storytelling books to show off. She thought teachers there might be interested in using them to help their students learn English. But what would really make the sale, she said, would be a CD with a native English speaker reading the book aloud.

I had a recording of the wonderful Emily Bezar reading the books, but I'd never gotten around to editing it. Emily had given me two complete readings plus variations of certain lines, so I decided to use a multitrack editor to make it easier to compare phrases. I set out the laptop on the kitchen table, fired up Ableton Live, and started cutting and pasting.

I had lots of options to choose among, but one element was missing. Normally, when my wife and I perform our books, we start by playing a little melody on an alto recorder (the flutey instrument). It's amazing how that creates a mood. Often audiences applaud right then, which puts everyone in good spirits.

But it was now too late at night to record the recorder, so I hauled out my wee two-octave MIDI keyboard and started searching through my software synthesizers for an evocative flute sound. I started with the Proteus Packs for Cakewalk Dimension. The E-mu Proteus, you may recall, was a rackmount hardware synthesizer that amazed the world 20 years ago with its high-quality sounds. It became so popular that E-mu produced a string of them. E-mu sound designer Tim Swartz recently converted his original Proteus samples into a sample library for Cakewalk's Dimension soft synth, boiling these thousand-dollar modules down into $79 downloads.

I did find a few contenders in the Proteus Pack, but they weren't quite the sound I was hearing in my head. (As Talking Head Jerry Harrison once remarked, in the age of preset synthesizers, we've all become librarians, forever trolling through lists of sounds.)

Turning online, I found Kong Audio Mini-DiZi, a VST plugin instrument for Windows. It wasn't an exact mental match either, but it had character. I quickly played the Momotaro theme, dragged it to the beginning of the audio session, and burned a CD. (Incidentally, of the half-dozen programs that popped up and offered to assist me in that task on Windows, iTunes seemed to be the easiest — and it supported CD-Text.)

• Momotaro Theme (368KB MP3)

This was just a quickie performance on a cheap keyboard. To hear what Mini-DiZi (and other Kong Audio instruments) can do with expressive playing, head over to the Kong Audio site. Kong also offers 40 free WAV loops of Chinese percussion.

And my friend? She sold the first book while still on the plane.