Jimmy Hellfire
Senior Member
Any chance you can elaborate about what you figured out?
I never understood what the second, third and fourth articulations meant. Previously I was using expression maps in a simple way - just create an entry for each articulation I wanted to cover and enter the respective name in the Art. 1 column (spicc, stacc, long etc.)
I wasn't aware that you could use Art. 1-4 simultaneously and that they could represent different categories or attributes. Admittedly, that's not all that interesting for sample libraries with a simple layout where you have your spicc, stacc, long, legato, marcato, pizz, bartok pizz, col legno, tremolo, that's it. You don't really need any more precise specification.
But for very complex libraries like Dimension Strings, you just need a more intelligent approach to organize this stuff. Or things like Synchron Strings, where you have all these variations - the longs can be soft attack, normal attack or marcato, but also no vibrato, light, strong, or xfade, etc. That's many parameters that, if you wanted to cover all variations of long notes would absolutely clutter up your expression map.
I realized that using the other articulation columns, I could further specify: long - which type of attack? - which type of vibrato? etc. In the MIDI editor itself, it just says "long", but under the list of articulations there are now additional lanes where I can specify which type of attack and vibrato I want for that note. Since these attributes are also available for legatos, it works the same: I pick "legato" and specify the rest below. Since tremolo can have a marcato as well, the same applies. This way, I can reduce the number of lanes in the articulation list while actually covering more specifics.
Another example could be Big Bang Orchestra Andromeda, where every single articulation can be senza piccolo or con piccolo. The best way to handle this is with a sort of global "switch", so Art.2 is perfect for this. The same could be used for global things like normal or muted, etc.
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