I hear you. The music industry has a few leaps to make yet, before real-time, high-quality playback of a score is achieved without requiring substantial time and technical savvy of the end user. One or two more insightful innovations need to happen.
Before Brian Roland turned me onto Bidule, I was considering heading back to Sibelius, as well, even though it would have pained me to (temporarily) give up on everything else that Dorico has to offer.
I’m going to try to get an entire conventional orchestra set up for playback, with most of the essential articulations playable. Hopefully, it won’t take more than a week.
Bidule looks like something with a lot of study to do as well before it will work flawles, Maybe I will look into this at some point, but at the moment I need my spare time to really write. No time to study something new. Thanks for letting me know though.
I’m having that very same problem right now for EWQLSO Platinum. I’m using the solo Trombone as my guinea pig. Have done as you suggested and changed the volume dynamic to CC11 within it’s expression map but I’m still not getting any variation within a long tied not when going from crescendo to diminuendo. Help.
I’ve moved away from EWQL but I did use the Diamond version for a long time, both Play and the more recent Opus. Happy to share this if it helps: I usually set a primary to CC11 as you did, but also set the secondary dynamic to CC7. I know that its not what you are supposed to do, but it worked for me when all else fails. Here’s a few examples for whatever they are worth… Take the .zip suffix off of course.
Thank you. I’ve invested in the BBCSO Pro but am waiting on the new iMac Pro to arrive before I can use. This Mac just can’t handle them, not even a string quartet (RAM etc). I got the EW dynamics in the solo trombone to work yesterday using C5 as middle C but for some reason it’s not working today. Obviously i’ve tripped something accidentally to stop it functioning
First answer? Two many rejection notices using EWQL that said the composition was good but that I needed to replace my library.
EWQL is like a huge container of (dry) legos. It takes around 2TB to hold it depending on how much of it you download - and I never had a machine that could truly handle it - several machines actually over the years, both Mac and Windows. I think you’d need the VSL multiple machine approach to really run it, but it doesn’t have the same tooling as VSL to make that possible. I had to get used to just living with dropouts as the score built up. Opus is better, but I was still making choices of did I REALLLLY want that other mic position or articulation loaded?
Overall EWQL feels to me as a tool made for an mix engineer by a mix engineer. All kinds of stereo doubling, built in filters, Ohmnicide, SSL EQ and Compressor, etc… I believe a great experience with EWQL may be possible - in fact, with the first couple of Spitfire libraries I bought I would learn some things and see if I could duplicate that sound in EWQL.
But I feel like a large part of what I’m paying for (with Abbey Road in particular) is what feels like a partnership with a mixer who routinely does current world class film scores, who has already done that stuff. Much better that I could, leaving me with significantly less work. I’m not saying that there is NO work - but a lot less with a better result for me.
Spitfire feels like a tool for composers by film composers. Spitfire feels simpler, more intuitive and I’m more able to play it in when time is crunchy. Similar to Dorico, I’m being to trust their team and way of thinking as much as the product.
As fantastic as Spitfire’s sample libraries are, what I really want to see is more of the performance scripting. Andy Blaney’s ensemble and solo strings performance programming work really well; most of the time, I can just write music and hear it played back quite well using the performance patches. No need to saddle my notation with all manner of accents or dynamics or slurs or staccatos, etc. It’s a shame that the same isn’t available for winds and brass, although one can still get excellent results out of them without too much effort.
I see.
I never got to composer cloud, because I never left the single mic position 16bit gold which was just 40Gb I believe.
9 years ago, I made this with it and was pretty happy with the expressiveness.
Thanks. I’ve managed to create a Romantic Symphonic Orchestra with most of EWQLSO and varying degrees of success. I’m really doing this so as to attempt to have a reasonable grasp of the software before the new Mac arrives and I bring BBCSO Spitfire to life. I’ve only been using Dorico now for about a week and then purely as an academic exercise. I’m very impressed, in particular regarding the user interface. Like a breath of fresh air. It’s the side drum I’m struggling with right now. Gone through EWQLSO manual and inputted the information into the Percussion map but nothing. Tried General Midi too and nothing. There are a few other issues such as wanting to edit notes within the Expression Map but that can wait, and I suspect I may be asking Dorico to do something it simply cannot because of the restrictions of the sample.
It’s somewhat labor intensive making the maps. I think it would be better if you could leave all windows on every area open as you work on it as you insert data and test the result.
Of course when they’re already made it solves a lot of the problem, except perhaps understanding how they’re set up in the first place.