Until now, I’ve done most of my composing in Sibelius, but I made the switch to Cubase in hopes of more control over playback and note entry options beyond a score view. While Cubase has a very deep set of features for achieving this, it has been a challenge to get everything working the way I want.
The dynamics maps and expression maps are excellent tools, but I’m having trouble getting them to work together. So far, I’ve gotten the best playback results by setting the dynamics map to affect the velocities rather than a controller or send volume. This is fine until I want to set up a dynamics articulation (e.g. accent, marcato, etc.). Since this also affects the velocity, an accent will be really loud, even if the dynamic is set to pianissimo. I know in Sibelius, accents act contextually, rather, their velocity is relative to the set dynamic. Is there a way for accents to behave this way in Cubase?
My goal here is to is to speed up my workflow by manually editing velocities as little as possible. My main hesitation with composing in a DAW has been the laborious nature of editing velocities and the difficulty of maintaining consistency in dynamics across a piece. I’m new to this, so I’m open to better workflow options if they exist. Any ideas?
In the Dynamics Mapping Setup, I only see percentages as an option, unless there is a way to change this. In the expression map, I’m using percentages as well since absolute values for accents wouldn’t work. Is it possible to use absolute values in the dynamics map? Also, the dynamics map and the expression map seem to be separate entities, each referencing the set velocity value in the piano roll. Since both of these maps contain velocity information, how does Cubase decide which rule is applied first?
Hmm. It does work as expected here. (also, sorry- I should have checked before posting, the velocity field of the expression map only uses percentages – was going from my faulty memory)
It would seem the dynamic is looked at first and the accent applied to the resultant value.
What happens if you create an expression map with only two Sound Slots?
1 — (blank for initialization)
2 Accent
(also, do you have a blank or initializing entry in top the sound slot? This is needed)
What happens if you create an expression map with only two Sound Slots?
1 — (blank for initialization)
2 Accent
(also, do you have a blank or initializing entry in top the sound slot? This is needed)
Aha! That fixed it. Rookie mistake. Accents and dynamics work great now; however…
I have specific values that I want to set for the velocity percentages in the dynamics map. I can do this, but I don’t see a way to save those settings as a preset, and they don’t seem to save with the expression map. As of now, I have to manually enter the percentages for each track. Surely I’m missing something here.
Dynamics and expression map do not share their preset.
If you set it up and then save a track preset you can keep your expression map and the dynamics settings, (and everything else that gets saved in a track preset.)