WindcryMusic
Senior Member
In my new template (almost done!) I am heavily leveraging Logic Pro X 10.4’s new articulation maps feature, along with ARTzID v2, in order to have a (slightly) more concise template where parts aren’t spread across as many tracks, and also to make a far larger set of instruments and articulations available to me without needing to spend time looking for and loading up new tracks.
Overall I’m feeling very positive about the effect I think this will have on my workflow. But it seems to me there’s also a downside, which is the greater difficulty (and sometimes the apparent impossibility) of balancing the volume of individual articulations within each section, when they are all on a single track and using multi-articulation patches. For a few libraries, e.g. NI Symphony Series, there are volume adjusters for each articulation, which is great, and I only wish all libraries did the same thing. In other libraries, e.g. Spitfire, it is at least possible to use a setting where the mic mixes are remembered individually for each articulation, which helps somewhat (although I’m worried it will be easy to accidentally throw things back out of balance anytime I decide to tweak the mic settings). But for many libraries, e.g. Orchestral Tools, there seems to be no way to adjust the relative volumes of articulations.
For some smaller libraries I suppose one could get around this by only using single articulation patches and switching articulations via MIDI channels only, and then use Kontakt patch volumes to balance them. But my impression is that this is inefficient and wasteful of other resources like memory … not to mention that this limits a track (at least one running with Kontakt, which is uniformly the case for me) to 16 articulations, a number that is well short of what some of these libraries have available.
So, how do others attack this problem, whether in Logic, or in other DAW’s with similar articulation mapping abilities like Cubase? Perhaps there are Kontakt features that I don’t know about that allow adjusting individual articulation volumes of multi-articulation patches? Or perhaps, where the articulations can be specified on a per-slot basis (as in OT’s Capsule), one could at least partially mitigate the problem by putting all of the “loud” articulations on a specific patch, and then adjusting the Kontakt volume for that patch? Maybe there are other approaches to this that I haven’t even thought of?
Please share your tips and tricks for this issue, if you have any! Me and my template thank you in advance ...
Overall I’m feeling very positive about the effect I think this will have on my workflow. But it seems to me there’s also a downside, which is the greater difficulty (and sometimes the apparent impossibility) of balancing the volume of individual articulations within each section, when they are all on a single track and using multi-articulation patches. For a few libraries, e.g. NI Symphony Series, there are volume adjusters for each articulation, which is great, and I only wish all libraries did the same thing. In other libraries, e.g. Spitfire, it is at least possible to use a setting where the mic mixes are remembered individually for each articulation, which helps somewhat (although I’m worried it will be easy to accidentally throw things back out of balance anytime I decide to tweak the mic settings). But for many libraries, e.g. Orchestral Tools, there seems to be no way to adjust the relative volumes of articulations.
For some smaller libraries I suppose one could get around this by only using single articulation patches and switching articulations via MIDI channels only, and then use Kontakt patch volumes to balance them. But my impression is that this is inefficient and wasteful of other resources like memory … not to mention that this limits a track (at least one running with Kontakt, which is uniformly the case for me) to 16 articulations, a number that is well short of what some of these libraries have available.
So, how do others attack this problem, whether in Logic, or in other DAW’s with similar articulation mapping abilities like Cubase? Perhaps there are Kontakt features that I don’t know about that allow adjusting individual articulation volumes of multi-articulation patches? Or perhaps, where the articulations can be specified on a per-slot basis (as in OT’s Capsule), one could at least partially mitigate the problem by putting all of the “loud” articulations on a specific patch, and then adjusting the Kontakt volume for that patch? Maybe there are other approaches to this that I haven’t even thought of?
Please share your tips and tricks for this issue, if you have any! Me and my template thank you in advance ...