Hi Paolo. Yes, we're here touching on one of the core issues in the use of a library as extensive as the ones VSL provides. To achieve a quality of realism that might transcend that of a "mockup" and be capable of standing on its own merits as performed music a herculean amount of effort must be expended in sculpting that performance by applying as much musically coherent variation as possible. There is no "out of the box" solution to this problem that will sound anything but a cliche, with the exception, perhaps, of the first time it's applied. My own approach to solving this problem is to leverage the power of an intelligent machine that has musical knowledge encoded in it, and can accept instructions from me as to how it will apply that knowledge in the form of a playing style. I want to be able to seamlessly, and at a whim, access the whole range of possibilities a VSL library offers in order to explore as many ways of rendering a performance of a particular composition as possible--zeroing in on the best solution to the creative challenge at hand. Music, to paraphrase Leonard Bernstein, is an infinite design space. We need tools, even better, assistants as design space explorers to be able to map out the veins of rich potential, to quickly separate cliche from meaningful novelty in our work. You might recall who painted the ceiling of the Sistine chapel... it wasn't Michelangelo.
Regards,
Kenneth.
-
Thanks for sharing your approach fahl5. It's an interesting approach. I like the fact that you're working with a concept of ensemble size.
-
Steffen,
Your method is very comprehensive, and a comfortable way of having all articulations always available. At this point, I should ask myself:
- how many articulations I would really need in a piece?
- do I need all the articulation, or can pick only the ones I relly need for that piece?I'm tempted by the second option, but I understand that with VSL you always want more articulations, rather than less.
Kenneth: Wasn't Michelangelo the painter of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling? Am I next to discover something?
Paolo
-
Hi Paolo,
The generalisation makes things easier to handle. Provided you do have a reasonable amount of RAM and yor VSL-Libraries on SSD's it is currently no problem to keep nearly the complete (silentstage) Superpackage (beside the Spitfire Orchestra and some other Libraries loaded simultaneously.
My VSL presets are simply full beecause I can use them in absolutly the same way for everything I ever want to, let it be chambermusic, baroque, oder 20th Century music when a piece needs a Violin track I just load "the Violin" Presets (and "the Violin" Kontakt-multi) leaving all musical decision open and changeable for the detail of programming.
This keeps me of from creating for each project completly new presets, Expresseion-Maps, etc. which is very tedious and time consuming the more powerful your available libraries are and the more detailed you intend to use them.
To keep those things easy helps me too concentrate on the musical decisions to be made when realising a certain composition.
With the upcomming synchronstage libraries things presumably will need some hardware upgrade and I also fear it will be not so easy to integrate them in my current presets, so may be I'll be forced to work with another seperate Synchronstage-Library-Track beside the VSL-Silenstage and the Kontakt-Libraries-Tracks.
However all we ever can do to keep things easy and universal reusable is definitly needed more and more the more the available Libraries makes things more complex and powerful. I still hope onetime the VSL-developper will understand how much their incredible good sample content will make profit from smarter more generalized and musical organisation for the users. Until then it seem to be still our job to make the best of it.
-
Hi Paolo, Michelangelo had a collaborator and assistants... http://www.ilariamarsilirometours.com/blog/michelangelos-assistants-in-the-sistine-ceiling
-
I'll answer to myself about the need for separate low-pitched and high-pitched instrument maps, to avoid overlapping the the instrument's playable range:
[QUOTE]But I would also avoid using keyswitches, that will force a different map for high-pitched and low-pitched instrument, to avoid overlapping. I would like to use CC32 also for VSL.[/QUOTE]
I could see how Spitfire Audio places their keyswitches in the two lowest MIDI octaves. Yes, you can't see them in the VI keyboard diagram, nor could you select them on the keyboard. But since we are dealing with sequence automation, this would not be important. In case you need to test the available sounds, single articulations will still be easy to select with the mouse in the VI window.
When a matrix is first added to the VI, X-Axis keyswitches are automatically placed starting from the lowest C on an 88-key keyboard. Repositioning them is very easy, by dragging the first note name in the X-Axis diagram. The same will happen with the Y-Axis keyswitches. An operation lasting less than ten seconds for each instruments.
Paolo
-
That is simply why I tried to avoid keyswitches as far as ever possible to keep the same articulation for all instruments triggered in the same way. And the Cubase Expression maps are reeally great for that.
If you keep that consequently you can easily copy passages from one track to another with all articulation and CC-programming which should than just act with different instrumenttypes in a correspondent way.
This is something which seems to me musically very reasonable, especially for orchestral scores where there often groups of instruments with parallel phrasing which can make a lot tedious work if the same phrasing must be done again and again always with more or less diifferent combinations of keyswitches.
This is one pretty good of many good reasons, why the selection of articulation need to be very much streamlined towards an universal handling for (nearly) all (tuned) instruments.
-
One of the weakest points of Logic (the DAW I use) is the lack of "expression maps" for anything other than its included sampler. Therefore, one has to rely on third-party scripts to avoid the hassle of using keyswitches embedded in the score.
As of now, I suspect the best way of using VSL is via keyswitches, combined into single commands from the script. Different scripts could do something different, maybe mixing notes, program changes and control changes, but at the moment I'm not aware of something like that.
A universal system of articulation selection would really be a bless. At the moment, we have to create our own personal systems, and probably stick with them nearly forever.
Paolo
-
Yes Cubase Expressionmaps are very helpful meanwhile there is still enough to improve for instance to really allow kind of "universal" articlationmapping (independet from very different libraries and their producers).
However since they always tend to come more or less in conflict with the possible midievents I tend to avoid keyswitches in the keyeditor as much as possible (another benefit of the cubase expressionmaps, is that they keep the keyeditor free from additional midievents).
In VI at least you can nearly all you are used to do with keyswitches also with CC data. That is at least how I trigger in my presets the decision between ensemble sizes (Y-axis = i put on CC4) and Articulationtype-variant (X-axis I put on CC 3).
The Spitfire System is likewise controlable without any keyswicht via CC 32.
Meanwhile I dont know Logic at all I expect this would be also possible in Logic.
And yes it would be really great if anyone (for instance Steinberg) conceives a real universal standard for articulation selection via midi working with all kind of libraries from all kind of sampleproducers. The scripts available for Logic seem to be at least interesting. I wonder if anything like this would make sense in Cubase.
