Thanks for your reply, Cyril.
Situater of course accommodates pretty much any of the usual combinations of keyswitches, articulation sets, MIDI CC automation and Logic's "fader message" automation. I'm currently using all of these in my work with Situater.
In the case of Syz Dimension Strings (complete), the template configuration example I've shown can cope with up to 4-part divisi, as I mentioned. In such a case, the user can either place two divisi parts in one staff, or keep each part in a separate staff, as I tend to do. Situater makes no difference in that respect. How would that be a problem?
When using Syz Dimension Strings, if there is never any divisi, and no changing between con sordino and sensa sordino, nor between regular, tasto and ponticello bowing styles, then of course one track, one channel, one Synchron Player and one staff can readily cope with everything that, say, the Violins 1 section is to play. However, where such changes are to be incorporated in a single piece, loading or changing sample-set presets in run-time is not, generally speaking, good practice - with or without Situater, nor indeed in any DAW or notation app. Hence all templates are configured to work around this problem in various ways. My template is no different in that regard.
There is of course the option - for those prepared to endure the tiresome clerical chores involved - of editing Synchron Player presets, in order to bring all required patches under the aegis of Dimension Controllers within one user-preset in one Synchron Player. Obviously the tradeoff here is between the work of editing VSL's library presets versus the work of editing a Logic-produced score that has some superfluous staves. That's for individual users to weigh up. My position is that I don't expect composers will want to risk wrecking their creative, intuitive, musical frame of mind by engaging in or worrying about IT-centric clerical chores. It might help if there was a respectable and trustworthy online repository for various user-edited VSL player presets of high quality and reliability.
I neglected to mention that Situater has a special feature for playing any instrument section polyphonically, such that the user can play keyboard reductions using, for example, horns, strings, or harp, etc, as desired - all properly intoned. For MPE synths and sample players, this facility is very simple to set up. But because VSL's sample players are not yet MPE, I have to set up 12 duplicates of one VSL player, then simply switch their Situater port to "Poly"; in this way the bank of 12 instruments can then be played as if one MPE instrument - keyswitches, articulation IDs, controllers and automation are automatically routed for all 12 instrument players.
But this special polyphony feature is intended primarily for sketching. Otherwise, the general rule (with a few exceptions such as harp and timps) in Situater is to treat each scored part as monophonic, just as they are in real life. Situater uses MIDI Pitchbend to produce orchestral intonation, so until VSL incorporates MPE, each VSL player can respond to only one pitchbend message at any one time, no matter how many notes may be sounding. Oh and of course pianos, organs and any other Equal Temperament instruments can also be used normally alongside Situater in Logic.
VSL's sophisticated sample set recordings, highly-skilled sample editing, and use of controllers/keyswitches, together with the relatively recent addition of articulation sets and maps in Logic and Cubase, have brought us beyond the old ways of scoring in a DAW. With that old method, a composer's original score in Cubase or Logic would be all over the place, pretty much with a separate track used for each and every individual articulation patch used in the composition. Then the orchestrater would sort out the mess and produce a proper full score and parts for the orchestra. And yet this old-school method lingers on here and there. For example it's still required by users who need negative track delays tailored to individual articulations, to compensate for inadequate coherence of individual voice-start and attack-development times throughout each library, or throughout their template of libraries.
Regardless of the quality of libraries in use, Logic's score editor is no match for Dorico, Sibelius, etc. For most if not all templates there will probably still be work to do before a presentable full score is produced from any non-trivial writing session in Logic. Situater and the template I've presented above certainly shouldn't make that situation any worse.
