For anyone interested, I finally figured out how to create my own ‘Stac on Bow’ aka “sticky bow” articulation in SSO (Spitfire Symphony Orchestra). Now I am no longer beholden to EastWest Opus where the ‘stac on bow’ articulation is that I’ve been using. The ‘Stac on Bow’ articulation is roughly the same as staccatissimo + accent. The goal of mine being that for an extended region of measures where I want to use the articulation I don’t have to have the staccatissimo wedge and accent over every note. For example, on the first measure of the region I would use the staccatissimo and accent markings; then, on the rest of the x measures, the first measure would say ‘sim.’ and the articulation name would be hidden (for me, ‘stac on bow’).
First I’m going to address the legato issue with SSO because that will impact everything you do; their legato is broken and you have to fix it by manually modifying the performance patch as follows:
Learn from me and DON’T try to use the wrapper for Kontakt (Komplete Kontrol). I found in the Babylon Waves documentation for Art Conductor that the SSO patches don’t work with Komplete Kontrol; in other words, ONLY use Kontakt (I’m using Kontakt 8).
Set the performance patch articulation type: UACC & UI ONLY (and lock it).
Click the very hard to see edit button under the name of the instrument.
Select ‘UACC #20: Longs - Generic’
Save the changes permanently (File > Save As and don’t change the name). They say to save it to a custom preset, but why if this is supposed to be a permanent fix and if worse comes to worse you can simply replace the patches with a fresh set of new ones.
Okay, now that that’s out of the way, here’s what I learned using Spitfire’s new AI assistant to create my own articulation.
First, for the benefit of beginners, in the VST rack add a new VST and set it to use Native Instruments > Kontakt.
Go into Kontakt, browse for the peformance patch and double click it.
Next, to use their performance patch, you have to set the expression map to ‘Velocity + Mod Wheel Dynamics’ in routing under the Track Inspector in the Play tab in Dorico.
Create the articulation (Playback Techniques and Playing Techniques). In my case I created ‘SSO Stac on Bow’ in Playback Techniques as the ‘Direction’ type first, because you have to have that first to be able to select it in Playing Techniques. Then I created the Playing Technique with the same name.
Go to Expression Maps under the Library menu.
Select ‘Velocity + Mod Wheel Dynamic’ from the list of expression maps.
Add your new articulation as a Base switch.
Since I wanted to approximate the combination of staccatissimo and accent, I set the ‘Length %’ to 18%, then the velocity range from 100 to 127.
Save changes.
I’m starting to see the advantages of UACC and especially the performance patches in SSO which make things easier in some ways.
That might seem exhausting, especially when unlike SSO, using BBC SO, pretty much all you have to do to use legato is add a slur over your desired notes.
I agree that in certain situations that the legato is bumpy and there is not always an obvious solution (quite often reducing velocity to just about the portamento level helps). But I’m afraid I don’t really follow your suggestion. Are you taking about a strings performance patch here? Surely you’re not suggesting replacing it with the long patch – which has its own issues like a swell on the note and is surely no replacement for a proper legato? But anyway, I don’t understand what you mean by the edit button under the name of the instrument. Perhaps a screenshot would help! Certainly I’d be interested in having a look at this at any rate.
If you go on Babylon Wave’s website and search their troubleshooting, I’ve given the exact solution that they said to use. I know, modifying the number doesn’t make sense to me either, but that’s exactly what they said to do and it works.
I will add a screenshot later today, pointing out where the button is to edit the UACC number. The button only shows up very faintly under the name of the instrument if you have it set to ‘UACC & UI’.
The biggest benefit in my opinion with SSO is not having to micro manage expression maps and settings for articulation.
I discovered that some of the performance patches were already set correctly to the 20 value I mentioned for UACC. Or maybe the software intelligently updated the remaining performance patches behind the scenes, once it realized what I was doing.
Btw, I mentioned several times about it being a performance patch.
To reiterate, to see the edit button for UACC in the performance patch in Kontakt, you MUST have the ‘UACC & UI’ option selected and locked. After that just select #20 in the list and save the changes (to fix the legato problem).
OK – the only thing I didn’t spot is the almost invisible arrow next to the CC20 which allows you to edit the value. As far as I’m aware, the performance patches are always set to CC20 – at any rate they always have been for me so there were no changes to be made in my set up. I always have had UACC&UI (or UACC KS & UI only which I read somewhere is desirable in certain circumstances but I can’t remember offhand where it would make a difference now with my maps). And a legato has always been invoked just by adding a slur to the notes as in any other library. My issue was solely that with certain patterns, the legato is a bit lumpy compared to the demonstration class of CSS for instance, So I don’t understand what Babylon Waves ar referring to when they talk about an “error”.
PS I now see Babylon Waves say that Spitfire introduced an error with v 1.0.1 of the library. My version says 1.3.4 so I assume the older 1.0.1 issue was sorted. At any rate their fix is clearly for a problem which doesn’t exist as far as I’m concerned.
