Awesome! I was hoping this would come. I just quickly tried it out for SE and at first glance it looks great! (And I'm looking forward to the mapping for the App. Strings I.)
For people wondering what the point is, for me, it looks like it will let me:
a) enter articulations in english (either on a per-note basis, e.g. note accents, or as a musical direction, e.g. play portato until further notice), rather than doing the map in my mind to matrix selection + matrix row selection + matrix column selection + a-b selection (for each instrument, which may have a different mapping!), and
b) move a part from one instrument to another
without having to redo the (up to) 4 dimensional selection of a VI cell
(matrix, row, column, a-b). (Of course, one still should be aware of the kinds of patches supported by each instrument) and
c) unexpected but possibly interesting: have support for midi articulations: increase velocity (accent), shorten/lengthen note (staccato staccatissimo), etc. I saw VSL put some of these in their map. Perhaps one could also do other technical tweaks to VSL to do things like turn Attack & Release up and down, or tweak the filter or crossfader.
And I can do this in a lane in the in-place editor, where I mostly work, which is great (or without it, I can still at least edit the per-note attributes in the event bar). It takes up some screen space in order to expand the articulations controller lane to be readable, but on the other hand I save the space for lanes I'd otherwise need to manage 2-3 CC lanes for row/column/a-b along with the mental anguish of things like making sure my controller value goes from the 58-64 range down to 0-12 and back again etc., and that the CC events match the timing of notes & parts. I'm new to Cubase/VSL and the world of composing and maybe I'm missing things (like I'm wondering if keyswitches are easier to manage than CC's), but if I spend less time fiddling with CC's and keyswitches, I think that qualifies as being more valuable than a gimmick to me. (Like Rainer said, a great feature for composing into the sequencer.)
(I don't have any use at the moment for scoring/notation, although it is nice that the articulations are integrated should that change.)
It looks like the Cubase 5.0.1 patch added the ability to control extra controllers, which is great! (Maybe VSL gave Steinberg a nudge? :) ) I don't know yet if there is a way for Cubase to do all this at once (or if it's needed): set the matrix selector keyswitch (maybe the CC101-112 could be used instead), set the Matrix row keyswitch, set the matrix column controller, and set an A-B keyswitch or controller. From the docs it sounds like it since now it supports 2 keyswitches plus 2 controllers?
Thanks Andi and VSL for putting these expression maps together!
Jared
