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Cinematic Studio Series Tips & Tricks! :)

Rob Elliott said:
CS2 - works perfect. VERY similar approach - just 'bigger'. Depending on how much you 'mix-in' (for me often about 60-70% relative volume) - works like a charm. Bigger sound = < 80% mix of CS2 (relative to CSS)
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Thanks, was always wondering about CS2. I started my composing adventures right around when CSS came out and it was my first major purchase, but I almost bought CS2 instead haha!
Rob Elliott said:
CS2 - works perfect. VERY similar approach - just 'bigger'. Depending on how much you 'mix-in' (for me often about 60-70% relative volume) - works like a charm. Bigger sound = < 80% mix of CS2 (relative to CSS)
Click to expand...
 
Hat_Tricky said:
Thanks, was always wondering about CS2. I started my composing adventures right around when CSS came out and it was my first major purchase, but I almost bought CS2 instead haha!
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I did that! I started with CS2 and then got CSS - both very cool - CS2 is a little rougher around the edges but still a great library.
 
I've followed this tutorial for setting up eq and reverb etc. for CSS and it sounds soooo much better:



And used his new room widener plugin instead of the waves doubler.

I've also created Cubase Macro's for dealing with the delay compensation. So based on the volume it will nudge the selected notes by the correct miliseconds. So you first make 3 logical presets, one for each volume setting, and afterwards combine all three into a macro. One click of a button and all notes shift to the correct spot.

Will try out the delay compensation script though. Really sounds interesting.
 
I rewatched one of Anne-Kathrin Dern's videos and I noticed she had a nice way of working with CSS legatos that makes you able to work with tidy, quantized notes:
  • Put negative delay at -100.
  • Set the velocity low on the first note of the phrase (unless you want an accent).
  • Put all following notes on high velocity (for fast legato). This works for both Low Latency and Expressive Mode.

The downside is you only use the fast legatos, but you could for example modify any specific notes that needed a slower legato transition. It's great for having a "lazy" troublefree way of working with CSS (I prefer not having to rely on third party community based plugins that may or may not work one year from now. No offense to the amazing people working on those, of course).

You could perhaps argue that you could just use the "Classic legato" patches for the same effect, but the first (non-legato) note attack doesn't seem to match the legato transitions as good as in the low latency or expressive modes.

Edit: Here's the video where she talks about it. It's timestamped to 5:10. She first talks about always using the slow legato for Cinematic Strings 2, and then goes on to talk about her method with CSS.

 
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Just got Cinematic Studio Brass!!! Now I am confused (being a new owner)

The problem: Brass short notes, the repetition (lowest velocity on the shorts keyswitch) notes seem to be the most agile, shortest notes I can coax out of this libaray - its ALMOST good enough for John Williams-esque stuff, but is there a way to get notes "snappier" and more agile? I'm shortening notes (in Reaper, setting grid to 128th notes and literally shortening notes to slivers)

A collateral problem to this is, I'm wondering if there's a more elegant and quicker way to switch between these shorts repetitions (or any of the shorts articulations that are all bunched in 1 keyswitch) and marcato/sustain (any other keyswitch) WITHOUT having to play(or more then likely draw) in the correct velocity to get the right articulation.

My CC lines looks like a mess because i'm bouncing up high for long notes and shaping , then draw DOWN to the lowest velocity to get those short repetition or staccatos, then back up. Problem is I have to zoom in on the MIDI view a TON, and sometimes there isn't enough room to get the CC back UP or DOWN without it residually affecting the long (so there's a clumsy sounding "bump" in velocity on a fading long note) Maybe this is problem with REAPER not having fine enough granularity on drawing in data? I wish the "points" on CC data could be closer together.

I'm sure there's a better way to do this and I'm just clueless, and reading a few threads here it seems like I can't set the shorts to individual keyswitches of their own in CS libraries. I can get lines to work, but it really takes FOREVER to get a quick line done with all the drawing in of CC data

I've tried having 2 separate tracks (one for longs, one for shorts) problem is I just don't have the CPU and RAM to do this.

Sorry for the long post!
 
Hat_Tricky said:
Just got Cinematic Studio Brass!!! Now I am confused (being a new owner)

The problem: Brass short notes, the repetition (lowest velocity on the shorts keyswitch) notes seem to be the most agile, shortest notes I can coax out of this libaray - its ALMOST good enough for John Williams-esque stuff, but is there a way to get notes "snappier" and more agile? I'm shortening notes (in Reaper, setting grid to 128th notes and literally shortening notes to slivers)

A collateral problem to this is, I'm wondering if there's a more elegant and quicker way to switch between these shorts repetitions (or any of the shorts articulations that are all bunched in 1 keyswitch) and marcato/sustain (any other keyswitch) WITHOUT having to play(or more then likely draw) in the correct velocity to get the right articulation.

My CC lines looks like a mess because i'm bouncing up high for long notes and shaping , then draw DOWN to the lowest velocity to get those short repetition or staccatos, then back up. Problem is I have to zoom in on the MIDI view a TON, and sometimes there isn't enough room to get the CC back UP or DOWN without it residually affecting the long (so there's a clumsy sounding "bump" in velocity on a fading long note) Maybe this is problem with REAPER not having fine enough granularity on drawing in data? I wish the "points" on CC data could be closer together.

I'm sure there's a better way to do this and I'm just clueless, and reading a few threads here it seems like I can't set the shorts to individual keyswitches of their own in CS libraries. I can get lines to work, but it really takes FOREVER to get a quick line done with all the drawing in of CC data

I've tried having 2 separate tracks (one for longs, one for shorts) problem is I just don't have the CPU and RAM to do this.

Sorry for the long post!
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1. Custom keyswitches: Expression maps are what you need! Off the top I don't know if Reaper has them, but I'd be shocked if there wasn't some way of doing it, at least as a community developed add-on.

(They are called expression maps in Cubase, other DAWs have different terminology, but Cubase had them first so it may give you better Google results).

2. Tightening the notes: not really. Depending on what you are trying to score, the multi tongue articulation might work.

There are some tricks you can do "under the hood" in Kontakt, but Cinematic Studio Series locks you out.

If you aren't already, use the solo patches instead of the section patches. Those will be a bit crisper.

Last, they won't be snappier, but depending on the line you can get more *agility* out of the legato or marcato legato.


3. RAM and one track per articulation: Depending on your DAW, you can load the same instrument on different tracks with only a modest increase in RAM.

If it is taking up too much RAM, you can load the same instrument multiple times in Kontakt and they will share the RAM resources. You simply create additional MIDI tracks assigned to the various channels in that Kontakt instance.

You should also look into using the purge feature in Kontakt.
 
Hat_Tricky said:
I've tried having 2 separate tracks (one for longs, one for shorts) problem is I just don't have the CPU and RAM to do this.
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Are you aware that you can disable the arts not used? Also purging samples is a great way to lessen the RAM load.

And yeah, you could use articulation set/expression map/whatever-it's-called-in-Reaper. Or, use a custom controller (hardware or an iPad with OSC) that outputs the keyswitch for you, like a button that sends the note with the exact velocity for the keyswitch. You can use the CC keyswitching but I find it buggy when you want to change multiple parameters at the same time.
 
brek said:
1. Custom keyswitches: Expression maps are what you need! Off the top I don't know if Reaper has them, but I'd be shocked if there wasn't some way of doing it, at least as a community developed add-on.

(They are called expression maps in Cubase, other DAWs have different terminology, but Cubase had them first so it may give you better Google results).

2. Tightening the notes: not really. Depending on what you are trying to score, the multi tongue articulation might work.

There are some tricks you can do "under the hood" in Kontakt, but Cinematic Studio Series locks you out.

If you aren't already, use the solo patches instead of the section patches. Those will be a bit crisper.

Last, they won't be snappier, but depending on the line you can get more *agility* out of the legato or marcato legato.


3. RAM and one track per articulation: Depending on your DAW, you can load the same instrument on different tracks with only a modest increase in RAM.

If it is taking up too much RAM, you can load the same instrument multiple times in Kontakt and they will share the RAM resources. You simply create additional MIDI tracks assigned to the various channels in that Kontakt instance.

You should also look into using the purge feature in Kontakt.
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THanks for the reply! Yeah i purge stuff as much as i can. I'll try that multiple kontakt - do i just stack a bunch of the same "Solo Horn" in 1 instance of kontakt, then assign different MIDI channels to them, then route them to multiple tracks?

I guess the big ask is - does anyone here have recommendations for expression maps for reaper? The more i read about them, the more I feel like i should just bite the bullet and set one up!

And on your point about the marcato, its amazing how much work that one Marcato patch can do. I shamefully admit that i've just set it to marcato and got (to my ears) pretty good results without all the MIDI editing. But some notes (non-repeated quick notes that I can't use double/triple tongue patch on) just need the Shorts-Repetition snappiness.
 
syrinx said:
Are you aware that you can disable the arts not used? Also purging samples is a great way to lessen the RAM load.

And yeah, you could use articulation set/expression map/whatever-it's-called-in-Reaper. Or, use a custom controller (hardware or an iPad with OSC) that outputs the keyswitch for you, like a button that sends the note with the exact velocity for the keyswitch. You can use the CC keyswitching but I find it buggy when you want to change multiple parameters at the same time.
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So i can disable the velocity controlling what articulation short i get? That would be huge - my whole complaint is having to draw (or worse, play in) these insane CC lines that bounce all over. I wish each individual short articulation could be its own keyswitch - this is possible with expression maps, they can extract them from CSB's coding?
 
Hat_Tricky said:
So i can disable the velocity controlling what articulation short i get? That would be huge - my whole complaint is having to draw (or worse, play in) these insane CC lines that bounce all over. I wish each individual short articulation could be its own keyswitch - this is possible with expression maps, they can extract them from CSB's coding?
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Right click the big Mod Wheel and select "Remove Automation CC1". Now you can only change it with either velocity on the keyswitch or with CC58.

But I also meant that you can alt+click the individual articulations to disable them in Kontakt. So for example if you only want legato on one track and the shorts on another you can disable all others on the tracks. This together with purging the tracks before starting to work on a song will make the RAM usage lower. For example, after purging, playing C-minor scale up and down a few times on CSB solo horn's legato patch, the RAM usage sits around 50MB, which is a reduction of almost 90%. Of course every Kontakt instance incurs some RAM usage, but I'm sure Reaper must be able to do multi-timbral instruments.
 
Henrik B. Jensen said:
Have you tried lowering the preload buffer or whatever it’s called in Kontakt?

Then it loads less into RAM and streams more from the harddrive inst
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syrinx said:
Right click the big Mod Wheel and select "Remove Automation CC1". Now you can only change it with either velocity on the keyswitch or with CC58.

But I also meant that you can alt+click the individual articulations to disable them in Kontakt. So for example if you only want legato on one track and the shorts on another you can disable all others on the tracks. This together with purging the tracks before starting to work on a song will make the RAM usage lower. For example, after purging, playing C-minor scale up and down a few times on CSB solo horn's legato patch, the RAM usage sits around 50MB, which is a reduction of almost 90%. Of course every Kontakt instance incurs some RAM usage, but I'm sure Reaper must be able to do multi-timbral instruments.
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thanks, I am hyped to try this out later today!!! will report back.
 
Any ideas for effectively EQing the brass? I might pickup Cinesaga or Project Colossus just to study how they used fabfilter ProQ3

One thing I do find great about the series is the niente function of CC1 can help you adjust note lengths - I was using this with the horns to get a more separated playing style when the releases weren’t quick enough
 
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VSTHero said:
Any ideas for effectively EQing the brass? I might pickup Cinesaga or Project Colossus just to study how they used fabfilter ProQ3

One thing I do find great about the series is the niente function of CC1 can help you adjust note lengths - I was using this with the horns to get a more separated playing style when the releases weren’t quick enough
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I just happened to see this post -- If you're interested in the CineSaga template, I'm having a black friday sale some time next week, but DM me and I can make you a single use coupon today if you'd like to give it a go at a reduced price. Cheers.
 
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