This is a great topic! I have the same problem also...each articulation has a track and so I end up with hundreds of tracks. I'd like some tips on using patches also. How exactly that would work I have no clue.

calaf

ditto on this for me

Rob

Isn't this what keyswitching is for?

Maybe I missed what you are saying, but changing articulations is supposed to be in best form via Keyswitching.

Evan Evans

Evan, my three complaints with keyswitching are...

1) If the piece is fast there is no way to manually keyswitch with the hand that isn't playing.

2) If you choose not to go manually then it takes too much time to type in each articulations. If you are improvising the last thing you want to do is type in each articulation.

3) In "chain mode" there are only 144 cells. This means your piece can only contain 144 notes.
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Hey paynterr, you might have already tried something like this but here goes anyway...just now I loaded two flute samples (stac and sus) into my sampler (Halion) and in Sonar in the track pane I set the chanel to "none". The patch I set to "1". Then I recorded a phrase with the stac flute. Next I manually went in and right clicked on the MIDI notes and in the note properties window that came up I selected "2" which is the sustain patch. It works. I know it takes time but this lets you have one track for each instrument. It also allows you to let the creativity flow and then you can go back later and change the articulations of particular notes.

Maybe there are other ways...I've only really gotten into samples the past 6 months so I wouldn't know...anybody else have any ideas?

calaf

What I meant by having separate tracks is that if I want the first violin section to split and play two different lines, it is hard to achieve.
What would be more useful longer term, would be to have recordings of a number of solo instruments (e.g. violin) and then to construct the string section myself.
This would involve recording lots of different instruments in order to get the correct tonal quality, since the same violin playing exactly the same sample 11 times will sounds rather nasty.
However, the point about being able to change articulations still stands. I will look into the keyswitching. Can you keyswitch to staccato whilst playing through the performance tool?

This probably is a Cakewalk-specific solution, but perhaps other programs either have a similar feature currently or will in the future. A new Sonar 4 feature is the addition track folders. As simple as this sounds, having a single folder per section is wonderful - it allows me to manage the many articulations as a single track if I desire, but can also expand it so that each articulation is its own track.

I've always preferred one articulations per track (I dislike keyswitching), and now this feature makes it more practical than ever. Whatever program you use, you may wish to encourage the developer to add this feature. I've really enjoyed the benefits of it.

@paynterr said:

What I meant by having separate tracks is that if I want the first violin section to split and play two different lines, it is hard to achieve.
What would be more useful longer term, would be to have recordings of a number of solo instruments (e.g. violin) and then to construct the string section myself.
This would involve recording lots of different instruments in order to get the correct tonal quality, since the same violin playing exactly the same sample 11 times will sounds rather nasty.
However, the point about being able to change articulations still stands. I will look into the keyswitching. Can you keyswitch to staccato whilst playing through the performance tool?

Yes, that's one of the intended features of the Performance Tool. You can "pre-program" a section you wish to play to automatically switch between different articulations as you are playing. This is called the Alternation Mode. I don't use it myself, because I prefer to use separate tracks for different articulations and program it myself.

@James Boer said:

This probably is a Cakewalk-specific solution, but perhaps other programs either have a similar feature currently or will in the future. A new Sonar 4 feature is the addition track folders. As simple as this sounds, having a single folder per section is wonderful - it allows me to manage the many articulations as a single track if I desire, but can also expand it so that each articulation is its own track.

I've always preferred one articulations per track (I dislike keyswitching), and now this feature makes it more practical than ever. Whatever program you use, you may wish to encourage the developer to add this feature. I've really enjoyed the benefits of it.

That sound interesting...I'll have to look into Sonar 4.

calaf

Track folding is also handled by SX and achieves something similar.
However, if you have 10 tracks all for different articulations, you need 10 midi channels for those 10 tracks, since (presumably) each track will assign its own program (and therefore presumably using up 10 programs in your sampler?).
This is different to using a single midi track and using program change events, which can achieve the same thing on a single midi track.
I guess the problem can be split into two issues:

1) How to better manage the issue of when to use 'solo' instruments and when to use ensemble instruments. My preference longer term - as I've stated - would be to construct the sections myself out of a variety of solo instruments with subtley different textures.

2) How to manage each of those instruments best in terms of controlling articulations/different playing styles/loudness.

For instance, I find it annoying that piano and forte samples are treated separately. Why not layer them along the velocity. If I want an instrument to play louder, I simply hit the key harder (or control it more precisely in the midi editor). I find it annoying to perform crescendos that build up using a pianissimo sample and then have to swap to a forte sample. There is no distinct cut off point. Instead, there is a range from silence to extremely loud. The latin terms just describe rough ranges of volume.

Ultimately, the best solution would be as if you had the entire orchestra in front of you and could control each player individually, adding and subtracting players according to whether you wanted a smaller or larger section.

Certainly, Halion can handle this number of players.

I typically have 4 - 10 tracks per instrument or instrument section. The first tracks have "fixed" program/bank assignments, like legato, marcato, pizz, etc. A few remaing tracks are then used for "parts" that can use program/bank changes for less common articulations, like sordino, col legno, etc.

I have balanced all the volume and panning for the "fixed" program tracks. I can refer to those settings when I am switching programs on the "flexible" tracks.
I find this a very nice combination of both approaches.

BTW, don't forget to treat individual instruments and sections as different "instruments" and create separate tracks and/or track groups for them. Don't switch between solo and ensemble programs on the same track. This makes mixing and panning (and stereo width) changes very tricky.

You may also want to make a distinction between dry and wet instruments in your track groupings. If possible, try to route their audio inputs into different mixer channels, so that you can handle them separately.

Just some thoughts,

Peter
www.PeterRoos.com

Not sure if this is an answer to the original question -- but recently I've been combining articulations in midi. NOT using performance edition, but rather combining articulations from different samples package.

Until starting to use Gigastudio 3, I would frequently change articulations within the same midi track; since its handling of program/bank changes is erratic, I've been dividing articulations more as Peter Roos does (above).

So for the current project, in Sonar 3 PE, I have about 110 tracks. The first violins are duplicated in three groups of tracks: 8 tracks using VSL Horizon Solo Strings, 8 different articulations, 8 tracks or so using Garritan Orchestral Strings, different articulations, 3 tracks using Seidleczek Advanced Orchestra (keyswitched articulations, so the duplicate tracks are used to simplify tuning using pitch wheel controller codes). The second violins are divided into three groups similarly, the violas and 'celli too. For double basses I'm using only two groups. Except for the basses, the same orchestral string line is duplicated three times, and then divided up by articulation into the appropriate midi track (by hand, needless to say: this all takes hours and days and weeks of time); tuning corrections are adjusted, alas, per package per articulation, because they all need tuning corrections.

this is going on too long -- don't even know if it address your question!