Abbey Road Orchestral Foundations expression maps not working

I’m most likely unaware of something but as of now, my expression maps aren’t working properly. I added the custom expression maps for Abbey Road One Sparkling Woodwinds (none of the other expression maps will work for Abbey Road. But my expression maps for other plugins will work). when I change the articulation in the piano roll, it remains “stuck” on the articulation in the plug-in. I’ve attached a screenshot. I’ve tried following some of the advice from other forums but am still stuck on this. Please see the screenshot.

It’s not clear that you really have a problem. If your Playback Cursor is at the far left with the Left Locator then this is how it should look. The articulation at the Cursor is Staccato and the VSTi is showing Staccato.

Why do you think the articulation is stuck?

I set the articulation to Staccato as an example. When it switches to Long in the key editor, it will remain in the Staccato articulation. The expression map will reflect it is in ‘Long’, but will still only play the Staccato articulation. The articulation will not switch from Staccato to Long, and it will not switch to Vibrato. That screenshot was to show if any of the settings in the expression map were not correct. Please see the new screenshot.

Here is another example of the articulation being set to Legato in the plug-in, the articulations will not switch to Long or Staccato in the plug-in during playback. It will remain stuck to Legato.

Try sticking a MIDI Monitor onto a MIDI Insert which will let you see what is being sent to the VSTi.

This is what it looks like with the Midi Monitor. I do not see the Articulation switch in this. I am also not using an external keyboard. I played these two notes and that’s the result in the Midi Monitor.

Well that’s interesting. For some reason the Key-Switches are not being sent to the VSTi. That would make me suspect the Expression Map itself of not sending the Event. But the Map looks fine as far as I can tell.

In the Track’s Inspector what is the MIDI Channel set to?

Could this be a mismatch of octaves – Yamaha use C3 for midi note 60, some others use c4?

good one, totally off my radar

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I may have found the solution. I changed it from Keyswitches to ‘Program Change Messages’ and it now works. Please allow me to know if this is how the channels are supposed to look in the Expression Maps. I am not used to Midi Channels; only used Keyswitches in the past. But now I have 50+ other Expression Maps set to Midi Channels since I changed it from Keyswitches to Midi Channels in the Expression Map menu. Is there a way to have certain Expression maps set to Program Change Messages and others set to Keyswitches in Cubase 11?

I was trying to create an expression map for some Abbey Road instruments and I discovered that the articulation change KeySwitch values shown in the VST instrument are one octave higher than the actual working trigger key. For example, when I create a new instance of the Abbey Road VSTi, I see that the KeySwitch values start at C-1 for the first articulation, then go up chromatically.

However, if you send those note signals (C-1, C#-1, etc.) the articulations in the VSTi don’t change! I hooked up a MIDI monitor to verify that I am, indeed, sending them. I even saw the software keyboard in the Abbey Road VSTi register the key presses at the correct keys!

Then, I noticed that the keyswitch keys in the VSTi are colored green and yellow on the software keyboard. I played around a bit and empirically figured out that the actual working keys start at C-2. Not C-1.

So, I created my expression map to trigger the notes that are one octave lower than what the VSTi says, and it works!

Thank you by the way for the tip about MIDI monitor, that’s a great tool I didn’t know existed :slight_smile:

Anyway I noticed that expression map note-on signals don’t show up there as actual note-on signals, they show up as “Score Direction”, but they do in fact trigger the correct keypresses in the VSTi. So, that seems like a Steinberg bug.