# Making Demos - Siblius, Spitfire Articulations and Logic Pro X



## Dan Dixon (Sep 17, 2018)

Hi

I'm an experienced orchestral player, music teacher and arranger for live musicians playing from notation. I do detailed arrangements in standard notation in Sibelius. (I've got a big powerful modern MacBook Pro, Sibelius Ultimate latest version, Logic Pro X). I have a need now to produce realistic sounding demos. I want the full control of the sounds of individual instruments in Spitfire and also want to use additional synth and ambient sounds in the mix in Logic. So I think the Noteperformer 3 add-on to Sibelius will be insufficiently granular. I want to put the instrumental parts into Logic Pro and then edit the articulations to exploit the range of sounds available in Spitfire libraries. I've seen I could add text codes in Sibelius to to this but it will be very tedious. Really basic question: the thing I don't understand is how I can edit the midi files of may arrangements I get into Logic Pro X via MusicXML from Sibelius to put in the articulations available in Spitfire. Why doesn't Spitfire read the articulations I put into the Sibelius - or will it? Anyone know how I should do this? I don't really want to have to play the individual instruments into Logic - I'd like to be able to edit individual notes. I've been watching Christian Henson's video and they're great, but it all seems to be about busking on midi controllers rather than sitting and writing out the arrangements first and then using the libraries to make them sound realistic and enhanced. Or have I got this wrong?


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## Dewdman42 (Sep 17, 2018)

You need noteperformer.

Good luck


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## BlackDorito (Sep 17, 2018)

Dan Dixon said:


> Hi
> 
> I'm an experienced orchestral player, music teacher and arranger for live musicians playing from notation. I do detailed arrangements in standard notation in Sibelius. (I've got a big powerful modern MacBook Pro, Sibelius Ultimate latest version, Logic Pro X). I have a need now to produce realistic sounding demos. I want the full control of the sounds of individual instruments in Spitfire and also want to use additional synth and ambient sounds in the mix in Logic. So I think the Noteperformer 3 add-on to Sibelius will be insufficiently granular. I want to put the instrumental parts into Logic Pro and then edit the articulations to exploit the range of sounds available in Spitfire libraries. I've seen I could add text codes in Sibelius to to this but it will be very tedious. Really basic question: the thing I don't understand is how I can edit the midi files of may arrangements I get into Logic Pro X via MusicXML from Sibelius to put in the articulations available in Spitfire. Why doesn't Spitfire read the articulations I put into the Sibelius - or will it? Anyone know how I should do this? I don't really want to have to play the individual instruments into Logic - I'd like to be able to edit individual notes. I've been watching Christian Henson's video and they're great, but it all seems to be about busking on midi controllers rather than sitting and writing out the arrangements first and then using the libraries to make them sound realistic and enhanced. Or have I got this wrong?


Spitfire tells you that their libraries are designed for interactive playing and not for use with notation programs. If you are a long-time Sibelius user (as I am) or simply want to work in notation, you indeed need to put a lot of extraneous markings because no-one has created a Sibelius "sound set" for the Spitfire libraries (see soundsetproject.com). Practically speaking, you would need to be prepared to put - for each note (!) - an articulation switch ("~C32,xx") and a "line" using a plug-in that provides a "ramp" of CC#1 values. I've been doing this for certain scores for awhile - it is slow going. Your path of importing MIDI into Logic Pro would be faster ... I am doing this in my DAW as well.


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## JT (Sep 17, 2018)

Dan Dixon said:


> I don't really want to have to play the individual instruments into Logic - I'd like to be able to edit individual notes. I've been watching Christian Henson's video and they're great, but it all seems to be about busking on midi controllers rather than sitting and writing out the arrangements first and then using the libraries to make them sound realistic and enhanced. Or have I got this wrong?


You can play each melodic line into Logic or use music xml to bring the Sibelius file's notes into Logic. Your choice.

Either way, you'll have to do extensive midi editing of the various CC control in Logic's piano roll editor. The main difference I see, if you bring the notes in from Sibelius, they will be computer perfect. For instance if you have a flute line doubling a violin line, they will line up exactly with each other.

In real life, no two instruments will ever line up perfectly with each other. So you'll need to make the lines "less perfect" in you midi editing. If you play each line in manually, the minor variations should be in there naturally.

Same concept with dynamics and articulations. In Sibelius, a specific midi CC value is assigned to forte for instance. Any instrument in the Sibelius score with a forte will play the note and get playback with the exact numerical value. In real life, every musician has their own concept of what forte is. It's all of these imperfections that make a track sound real and not synthesized.

Bottom line, get your music into Logic in whatever way you choose and learn how to use Logic's tools to edit them.

Edit: You might be aware of this or not, but there are articulation switchers for Logic which make switching Spitfire articulations very quick. Ones to check out are: Ski Switcher, Art Conductor, AG Articulation Switcher. This allows you to have you violin 1 part on a single Logic track and you choose from a pulldown menu on what notes the Spitfire articulation will change. Much faster than putting in keyswitch notes.


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## ism (Sep 17, 2018)

If your want a really good mock up, it’s debatable whether importing midi into logic would save you any time in the end. But precisely because you’re an experienced musician, I’d suggest that you might find playing the lines in yourself and capturing the performance directly ultimately faster than importing and then figuring out how to program the performance into the midi.

It might depend on the instrument and the articulations though - importing midi on simple ostinatos, perhaps combined with a ‘humanize’ midi transformation (or plugin), might save you time with certain lines. A legato violin line however - I’d guess performing it is almost certainly your best bet.

In my limited attempt to do something similar, I think I’ve come to a hybrid approach - import the midi, but then duplicate each track. Keep the bits that sound ok, but delete the rest, open up the original track in the score window and use that to guide your (re)performance. 


And there are variations on this. Keep the notes, but throw away any dynamics or ccs that came from the midi import. Then just re-record, the dynamics with the mod wheel. Probably best for slow lines though.

You’ll probably have to edit the tempo in logic also. Which can be tricky. Which is one reason I tend to turn off the metronome and just perform everything without worrying about where logic thing the bar lines should be. Again, depends on the piece.

I very much doubt that there’s much, if any, efficiency to be gained by trying to get Sibelius to explicitly export midi for spitfire libraries. 

Good luck!


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## BlackDorito (Sep 17, 2018)

ism said:


> I very much doubt that there’s much, if any, efficiency to be gained by trying to get Sibelius to explicitly export midi for spitfire libraries.


It depends on how dedicated you are to Sibelius and to Spitfire. If notation is your preferred representation and editing environment - and the notation editors in your DAW are not up to snuff (which can be for several reasons depending on the DAW) - then you may be willing to put up with the difficulties of sculpting each note in Sibelius. All the same, as mentioned, for realism you may consider doing the following after importing into your DAW:
- creating a tempo map with small or large tweaks
- adjust overlaps of the note-on/offs in the MIDI editor for the right legato/release/human feel
- tweak velocities on Spitfire 'short' notes
- record or draw CC#1 envelopes for realistic swells
- add CC to switch articulations (or use Cubase maps)

Since I own Notion 6, which is a simple sketching tool, I tend to target Spitfire libraries either as:
1) enter fairly complex music into Notion to get a feel for how it sounds; then export the MIDI into Reaper and tweak as above for Spitfire .... or,
2) originate the score in Sibelius and do the tweaks in Sibelius (laborious). If I had a Sibelius sound set that simply recognized staccato, accents, and a few other things (i.e. "did the right thing" for Spitfire libraries), I could work much faster in Sibelius.


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## ism (Sep 17, 2018)

BlackDorito said:


> It depends on how dedicated you are to Sibelius and to Spitfire. If notation is your preferred representation and editing environment - and the notation editors in your DAW are not up to snuff (which can be for several reasons depending on the DAW) - then you may be willing to put up with the difficulties of sculpting each note in Sibelius. All the same, as mentioned, for realism you may consider doing the following after importing into your DAW:
> - creating a tempo map with small or large tweaks
> - adjust overlaps of the note-on/offs in the MIDI editor for the right legato/release/human feel
> - tweak velocities on Spitfire 'short' notes
> ...



Fair point. Some possible efficiencies here.


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## Ch Menager (Dec 22, 2018)

Hello Dan,
je vais tenter de charger sur Logic Pro l'export d'un fichier Général Midi de Sibelius (Partition orchestre de Traviata de Verdi) avec bibliothèque Spitfire. Je te donerai des nouvelles au 15 Janvier 2019 !
amitiés, bye !


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