Workflow with String Glissando and Sibelius

[J.Hall]

Hi

I am on the fence regarding buying the Full Orchestral Strings I, mainly for the glissandos, since I use a lot of long string glissandos in my music. I mainly use Sibelius and I know people often say that Vienna's main use is in DAWs and I realise this

I would like to know how easy/hard it would be to realise gestures like the attached example. As far as I can tell it would depend on the tempo to get them exactly right but it wouldn't really matter if the glissandos is just a little off here and there. 

Or is the glissandos aimed at DAWs to realise music?

Best Regards,
Jörgen


PS. I have used the Audition Software to try the glissandos but it's hard to get a grip on how it would work in Sibelius.

[andi]

Hello Jörgen!

Please note that performance glissando articulations are only included for the Solo Strings I and the Orchestral Violins, but not for the other Orchestral Strings or other Strings collections.

Glissandos like in your example can be done with our glissando articulations and Sibelius, but you need to fiddle a bit. The articulation has to be added to a custom cell in the VI preset and the live start position and playback durations have to be edited in the Sibelius Inspector to have the glissando sound at the correct place. More about that can be found in the "Optimzing Sibelius Playback" manual, pages 12 and 19.
http://www.vsl.co.at/en/MyDownloads/Notation_Related

To get the correct length of the glissandos, you may want to use the Stretch option of the Vienna Instruments Pro player.

Best regards,
Andi

[J.Hall]

Thank you for your answer! Would it work in a similar way as the clarinet and trombone glissandos?

[andi]

Yes, it's similar to the way you trigger Clarinet and Trombone glissandos. The only difference is that for the Strings you will have to use a custom cell.

Best,
Andi

[MassMover]

@andi said:

Please note that performance glissando articulations are only included for the Solo Strings I and the Orchestral Violins, but not for the other Orchestral Strings or other Strings collections.

 

I might be wrong but I own the Full Special Edition which includes Portamento, which is most likely what Jörgen is after. In the full collections there is perf_portamento in all of the orchestral strings, solo strings and chamber strings, some of them also contain the zigane portamento, also the appassionata strings (except the basses) have perf_portamento.

 

Technically the transition starts on Note-On, so what you have to do in a DAW is to place the notes before the moment where the target note should be reached, in a notation program this is doable but in a less intuitive way.

[J.Hall]

@andi said:

Please note that performance glissando articulations are only included for the Solo Strings I and the Orchestral Violins, but not for the other Orchestral Strings or other Strings collections.

I might be wrong but I own the Full Special Edition which includes Portamento, which is most likely what Jörgen is after. In the full collections there is perf_portamento in all of the orchestral strings, solo strings and chamber strings, some of them also contain the zigane portamento, also the appassionata strings (except the basses) have perf_portamento. Technically the transition starts on Note-On, so what you have to do in a DAW is to place the notes before the moment where the target note should be reached, in a notation program this is doable but in a less intuitive way. Actually I need even and slow glissandos. But I appreciate the help!

[MassMover]

When working with samples you should never take the name of the articulations literally. You want a continuous slide from one pitch to another. With real Instruments the technique involved would be called "glissando".

However, in the VSL world there are several articulations which might give you what you want:

• perf_gliss
• perf_portamento
• perf_leg_zigane
• leg_sulG
• perf_leg_on_the_same_string
• perf_leg
• perf_grace

Not all of them are available for all the instruments, most of them are found only in some string library, some might even be unique to one instrument.

They have different tempos, so that if you want a slow glissando over a wide interval the actual slow versions might be the only possible solution, but as your example is mainly showing seconds, also the somewhat "faster" versions like portamento and zigane could actually be better suited. If you have VI Pro you can use the timestretch feature to suit them even better, and finally you can insert several chromatic notes to build one long continuous glissando out of the shorter halftone-glissandos.

[PaoloT]

I admit I can't understand how the glissando works, and the documentation is not helping me much. What I do, in Sibelius 6, is:

1. With the VSL House Style loaded, create a string quartet.

2. Join two notes with the glissando line from the library, and add the technique text "custom1" or "custom2" to the second note, depending on the passage.

3. Load the "Solo Violin" Sibelius preset in Vienna Instruments Pro (inside Vienna Ensemble).

4. Add the "perf_gliss_G" (or any other string) patch to a custom cell (A6, B6, C6) of the basic matrix.

When playing the glissando passage from Sibelius, the Performance_L2 matrix is selected, and one of the "perf_portamento" cells is selected.

There is no apparent way to having the custom cells selected. What am I doing wrong?

Paolo

[PaoloT]

Ok, maybe I understood my mistakes.

- I shouldn't use the "glissando" line, but the ordinary line. For some reasons, the glissando line shifts the starting note to the same pitch as the second one.

- The perf-gliss_[note] patches have a range limited to one octave + one major third. Out of this range, the glissando can't play.

With this in mind, now I can have the glissando play correctly.

Paolo