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Berlin Strings Single and Multi Articulation question

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rainierjmartin

New Member
I actually have two questions concerning the capsule system :).

Firstly, in the Orchestral Tools Help Desk, it says you can combine Single Articulation patches with Multi Articulation patches using the Mute Instrument keyswitch, but it's unclear as to how this can be accomplished. How exactly do you combine them together on one midi track?

Second, let's say I use the Single Articulation Legato patch and a Longs patch together as per my first question. Can the Single Articulation patch legato transition into an articulation on the Multi Articulation patch? For example, can a note from the single articulation legato patch transition into a portato on the multi patch?

Sorry if this seems convoluted but any help would be appreciated.
Click to read more...
 
I never got the idea of the mute switch. But depending on your DAW, you can just use another ID or midi channel. I combine multis and a lot of single patches on one track.

Second: No, only within the multis.
 
With Cubase's Expression Maps, you can hand pick all the articulations you want, put them all on their own midi channel and select them as you need, all on one single instrument track.
 
I have just bought Cubase and hardly started to use it yet - and sorry for the off topic question, but - is changing MIDI channels the only way to select new articulations on the fly? In Logic, MIDI channels are used to define polyphonic voices in the score editor, so while I wish Logic had it's own parameter for "voice", I hope Cubase will get a dedicated parameter for articulation ID numbers (a la Logic, except that Apple has had articulation IDs for many years but don't seem to develop the idea much).

I guess you are talking about this page, rainierjmartin?
https://www.helpdesk.orchestraltools.com/hd_one_track_per_instrument.html

Are you aware that you can activate legato for the longs (or any other articulation) in the multipatches? Since this is possible, one could have both a legato version of longs and a polyphonic version of longs inside the same multipatch, but for that to happen, OT need to implement support for having several instanses of the same articulation in multipatches.

On another note - I guess the answer depends a little on what you want to do with that combo. If you want to compose improvise using a sound which both have a playable legato and is polyphonic, you could always simply load both presets into Kontakt and layer them.
There's also possibly a way to define that each of the instruments are limited to eg a predefined velocity layer. But OT's own suggestion implies, I guess, clicking on the lowermost icon on the lefthand (the one with all the small squares), and define a CC value to control Mute Instrument, under "Instr. Options". If you assign Mute Instrument to eg note A-1 in both instruments, clicking on A-1 on your keyboard will mute one of them, and unmute the other.
Thanks for asking the question, btw, I wasn't aware of this option!

Screen Shot 2017-02-03 at 23.44.22.png
 
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Using Legato and polyphonic Sustain in the multis is possible., if you assign a CC to switch between the two modes, which is very usable. BUT, you will miss some of the advanced legato features of the single Legato patches. And I also like to have the Trill Orchestrator patches instead of all the single trills.
 
I also have a question: is the sus patch in the multi, when tweaked with the legato, the exact same as one of the single legato patches? Because there are no legato patches in the multis, only sustains. I.e. do you load both the multi and te single patch legato for each instrument group in BS?
 
As far as I understand, the single Legato patches are a combination of all available Sustain patches with legato transition, triggered via velocity, CC and playing speed. With the patches in the Multis you miss this opportunity.
So I have both in one Kontakt instance, Legato and a Multi patch with Sustain options. The ladder in case I need more than one voice or I want to xfade the vibrato variations. Unfortunately this it not possible in the Legato patches.
 
Heinigoldstein said:
Unfortunately this it not possible in the Legato patches.
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Maybe that could be solved in a future update by adding a legato on/off switch in the legato patches (like eg. Cinematic Studio Strings has)?
mwarsell said:
is the sus patch in the multi, when tweaked with the legato, the exact same as one of the single legato patches
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They probably use the same samples (for the sustained part of the sound), but the legato you getting by enabling legato for individual multi-patches isn't as advanced as the legato you get in the dedicated legato patches. Also: when using the legato patches, you don't have access to the advanced functions the multis have, eg. crossfading between 2, 3, or 4 different articulations in real time. I guess the limitations exist because Kontakt simply can't handle enough samples to offer all these functions within one single preset.
 
Vik said:
Maybe that could be solved in a future update by adding a legato on/off switch in the legato patches (like eg. Cinematic Studio Strings has)?
Click to expand...
Sorry for that misleading suggestion - one can already use the sustain pedal to enable polyphonic sustain mode in the legato patches.

I still wish there was a simple way to crossfade between vibrato/non-vibarto, and not just cross-switch, but have found that wjen loading two Kontakt instruments on the same track, one can invert the curve for one of the instruments, and thereby crossfade eg. between two legato instruments (one with vibrato, the other without).
Screen Shot 2017-04-09 at 11.15.42.png
 
In Reaper, you can set legato to channel 1, and multi to channel 2. Ctrl-W in my ReaNote plugin will make the note 'staccato' and 'track 2', so it's very easy to keep them on 1 track. As far as I know, however, creating a legato transition between the 2 seperate patches is impossible.

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=177142
 
mwarsell said:
I also have a question: is the sus patch in the multi, when tweaked with the legato, the exact same as one of the single legato patches?
Click to expand...

No, they are not the same. You can tell just by A/Bing them. But I did write to OT a while ago asking if this is intentional behaviour, and they said yes. In fact, I agree with them: it's very useful. Sometimes, the sound of the legato in the single patch works better, sometimes better in the multi, depending on the line one is writing. Also, for 1st Violins, one can only combine the slurred and fingered legato in an unbroken line using the multi. And, also, the ostinato legato that they added is only found in its own single patches.

BST, for me, is such a complex, multi-faceted library, that I both love and hate it. I hate it because it's resource-use makes it impossible to, realistically, fully load all of its options. I love it because it has so many options. My strategy has been to try and get to know it as best I can, and load it "on demand" as I write lines. I think you'd need 128GB of RAM to keep a full Berlin template loaded into RAM, TBH.
 
ModalRealist said:
I think you'd need 128GB of RAM to keep a full Berlin template loaded into RAM, TBH.
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If you have one computer for the full orchestra, yes. But you can easily load the full BS with a 64gb system plus some more patches, given that you use low buffer settings in Kontakt, which requires an SSD. On the other hand, I can load a full orchestra on my 128gb slave PC including BS full, but with dense orchestrations that machine will at some point run into streaming problems, which clearly tells me we still need 2-3 PCs at least for diese orchestration, using multiple legato patches and including libraries like BB, where you need to load every single instrument (BB is 180Gb).
 
The solution is NVMe SSDs. The Samsung 960 has continuous read of 3300, about 7x as fast as a standard SSD.

If you have 3 of them, and your libraries split between them (strings on 1, brass on the other, woods on the other. Or IMO better Violins I on 1, Violins II on 2, Violas on 3, Celli on 1, Basses on 2, Trumpets on 3 etc) so you get a somewhat even workload.

Then you can set absolute minimum prebuffers, lower your ram usage, and throw away your franken-slave :P
 
Phryq said:
The solution is NVMe SSDs. The Samsung 960 has continuous read of 3300, about 7x as fast as a standard SSD.

If you have 3 of them, and your libraries split between them (strings on 1, brass on the other, woods on the other. Or IMO better Violins I on 1, Violins II on 2, Violas on 3, Celli on 1, Basses on 2, Trumpets on 3 etc) so you get a somewhat even workload.

Then you can set absolute minimum prebuffers, lower your ram usage, and throw away your franken-slave :P
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No, you cannot. At least not, if you want to run intense orchestration with multiple mic positions, possibly layering and without having to bounce to audio in between. I have several NVMe drives and in spite of those, on PC (or Mac) does not provide enough voices to do it.
You can certainly do lighter pieces, but if you seriously tried mocking up a fully orchestrated piece (take a John Williams Scores as an example, maybe Harry Potter-dense or Starwars-dense), one PC will fail.
That is why Richard Games is totally right that one maxed out PC is a waste of money vs. two decent ones. The only con of the two PCs is they need more power, which is a factor where I live ... but besides that, the two PCs will make a denser arrangement possible than the one.
 
It's totally possible to make dense orchestrations on a single powerful computer. But the library has to be optimized as well... OT stuff unfortunately isn't.
 
FriFlo said:
No, you cannot. At least not, if you want to run intense orchestration with multiple mic positions, possibly layering and without having to bounce to audio in between. I have several NVMe drives and in spite of those, on PC (or Mac) does not provide enough voices to do it.
You can certainly do lighter pieces, but if you seriously tried mocking up a fully orchestrated piece (take a John Williams Scores as an example, maybe Harry Potter-dense or Starwars-dense), one PC will fail.
That is why Richard Games is totally right that one maxed out PC is a waste of money vs. two decent ones. The only con of the two PCs is they need more power, which is a factor where I live ... but besides that, the two PCs will make a denser arrangement possible than the one.
Click to expand...

I never use mic positions; only close mics with reverb. Wet mics never sound good to me.

Anyhow, what kind of NVMe drives are you using? Samsung are faster than other NVMe SSDs. You have the libraries split across drives, and have lowered the Kontakt Sample buffers?
 
rainierjmartin said:
I actually have two questions concerning the capsule system :).

Firstly, in the Orchestral Tools Help Desk, it says you can combine Single Articulation patches with Multi Articulation patches using the Mute Instrument keyswitch, but it's unclear as to how this can be accomplished. How exactly do you combine them together on one midi track?

Second, let's say I use the Single Articulation Legato patch and a Longs patch together as per my first question. Can the Single Articulation patch legato transition into an articulation on the Multi Articulation patch? For example, can a note from the single articulation legato patch transition into a portato on the multi patch?

Sorry if this seems convoluted but any help would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
Hope I haven't misunderstood your question, but there is an easy way to do this in Capsule. If you go to a multi patch, you can load a sequence of articulations by pressing their relevant keyswitches at the same time to load them into a patch. You can then choose whether these are controlled by CC or velocity etc. I've just spent ages trying to work this out and only got a solution by watching this:

 
2) If I understand right, you want to switch legato from a Legato Single patch into another articulation within a Multi patch. !?! This is not possible. Only within a Multi you can use Legato transisition for all articulations.

1)I never understood the mute key to be honest and I think it's a bit too complicated. If you use Logic, I strongly recommand Peter Schwartz' ARTzID. It makes live so much easier with keyswitches. You can use several Multis and Single patches on one track.
 
I have tried doing this over the past couple of weeks so that I can have single and multi patches on one channel as suggested by the user guides for CAPSULE.

Effectively I tried making CC32 mute the single patch instruments. This is accommodated for in CAPSULE. I set the value to one that UACC uses from the Spitfire libraries and had one slot in the multi patch that had nothing in it, so you can mute the multi with one keyswitch:
  • if I wanted legato I would set CC32 to 20 that un-mutes the legato single patch and press B-2 to mute the multi
  • if I wanted staccato I would set CC32 to anything other than 20 that mutes the legato patch and press D-2 to select the staccato in the multi
Unfortunately I found this didn't work so well because:
  1. When you load a session again the mute/un-mute state of the instrument is not remembered, so until you give the instrument some of this mute information all the instruments on the channel will play
  2. A single articulation patch must be un-muted before it is muted again. For example, if CC32 at value 20 will un-mute the legato, setting it to 19 first will not mute it. You have to set it to 20 first, then set it to 19
  3. I also tried keyswitches and for whatever reason the keyswitch velocity is not used - the keyswitch only toggles the mute state regardless of its velocity
I've already put this to Tobias at Orchestral Tools and the development team will get bugs for the latter 2 issues.
 
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