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  • up & down string bowings

    With regard to the VSL instruments that show the split keyboard for up-bows and down-bows, the decision as to which to use seems automatic. Just playing a phrase does shift back and forth, but it doesn't give me any sense of a pattern here. Could someone explain that? The Perf tool manual mentions up/down bowings with the alternation tool, but I don't see anything on how to make it happen. I guess the question is, can I control the up/down bowings with those instruments which have them in the samples? Russ

  • Hello Russ,

    the Performance Repetition gigfiles, do have the up and down bows alternations.
    The musicians starts generally with down bow, so in a rep9 instrument
    number 1,3,5,7,9 are down bows and 2,4,6,8 are upbows.

    All the short notes of the stringenesmebles have to variations:

    1 = downbow
    2 = upbow

    This is the stuff where you can use the Alternation Tool for auto switching.

    best wishes
    Herb

  • Russ,

    I'm not sure if you have your answer yet, so let me see if I can help.
    Let's say you want down and up bowings for staccato violins. Load stacc violins 1+2 into a channel. Go to the performance tool, and choose the corresponding channel's alternation tool. Go to the alternation tool screen and in the left hand corner choose file and navigate to alt-set-_strings. Choose VI-14_alternation.pal. Now hit C1 on your keyboard and your staccatos should automatically be alternating. down and up strokes. If you hit C#1 your pattern will reverse. There are many patterns there and you can make your own by switching the numbers or starting from scratch. Hope this helps.

  • Thanks to both of you for your replies. It's pretty simple. I got hung up on two errors in the manual that confused the issue. Herb, I don't know if you have an errata page to report errors, and you probably know about them, but let me just mention that page 13 is confusing, especially since it's the first page you would come to on the up-down issue:

    The first entry under Short Notes (stac 1) lists 1st variation as up-bow, and the next entry (stac 2) lists "1ST variation" as down-bow. Obviously, the second should say "2ND variation" but then, the whole thing is incorrect anyway, as 1st var is actually down-bow (and 2nd is up-bow) throughout the library, but you can't find that out until you look closely at individual mappings later in the manual. I really do appreciate your help, guys.
    russ

  • I didn't checked that there is an error in the manual, sorry.

    best wishes
    Herb