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English Language : Music Technology : Blog 
Saturday 3 January 2009 : Appropriate parameterization of the library Special Edition of Vienna Symphonic Library. Part 2: Greater expressiveness in music phrases |
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About music software This time it was more difficult. Each sound library has its own weirdness and peculiarities that you must eventually be able to learn and use at your own advantage for a good musical result. For reasons of space economy I will only write the final solution I found to the problem of expressiveness of musical phrases omitting all previous (failed) attempts. So, let's take the violins as an example: in the basic legato form that can be used there are 2 kinds of samples: those for the gentle notes (piano) and those for the loud ones (forte). For musical - I assume - reasons, the attack of the gentle notes (piano) is rather longer than that of the loud notes (forte). Probably this is the way the violinists themselves play.  The problem occurs when someone wants to play a passage which is not a "strict" legato. We are here talking for a quiet passage. Let us therefore assume that one holds a note for a small time interval and then "jumps" to another. The first note will not be heard as intended because the attack will be long enough (because of the piano). An actual violinist would give that note a very small attack for achieving a better phrase articulation. So, we would simply like a small attack of the gentle note where it has a large one. Let's recall that the specific library uses samples, so the only option available to us is to use a sample with a small attack in the place of the one with the large attack, but the note should sound in the same gentle manner as before (**). The solution I found was - once again - writing a program CAL (Cakewalk Application Language). This very program searches inside the recording for notes that are both small in length and being played gently (so that their execution is problematic for the reasons mentioned above). We increase the value of velocity (intensity of keyboard pressing) of these notes in order to sound like loud notes (those with the small attack that is). However, in order for the final result to listen in the correct way, we should also reduce the volume of the channel so that will be heard more gently and will be at about the same physical volume as the original. This is achieved by changing the value in the continuous controller attached to volume (in this very library this is the controller with the value 11). Thus we have achieved our goal. An additional difficulty for us in this program is that in the case of any new note we must keep the previous status so as to know if there already has been a change in the channel volume or not. This is necessary if one considers that the notes which were recorded loud from the beginning do not need any processing or change. Moreover, we should pay attention to the calculations of the correct final value for the velocity in the case of the gentle notes. The manipulation mentioned above through the CAL program works well enough so that one can write any passage he wants (with or without legato) using whatever velocity he wants (piano or forte) and still sounding quite convincing and congenially. We can accomplish this by playing the passage in the normal way and simply applying the specific CAL program at the end of the recording. End good, all good! (**) Of course, the specific library has several ways of executing the violins, so the problem could also be solved by using another family of samples eg. spiccato or staccato. However, this would have caused some additional problems: a) greater demand on memory (I have long been near to the limits of my system!), b) greater difficulty in the recording due to the patch change in real time, c) the need to find the appropriate sample in each case. Moreover, the final musical result could not justify the extra burden, so I found the solution mentioned in this article. |
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