Ending playing techniques with Natural or?

I recently purchased Spitfire Symphony Brass, which uses the Kontakt player. To select from a variety of articulations and techniques, often it is necessary to load multiple patches for the same instrument. I’m using Spitfire’s [UACC KS](https://spitfireaudio.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001951793-What-is-UACC-KS-and-how-do-I-use-it-#:~:text=UACC%20Key%20Switch%20(UACC%20KS,single%20key%20switch%20becomes%20available.&text=The%20main%20advantage%20of%20UACC,switch%20on%20the%20piano%20roll.) approach in my expression map, which combines CC with a single key switch. In the video you can see the solo trumpet loaded twice in a single instance of Kontakt. The top patch contains several standard articulations and the bottom patch contains only flutter-tongue, which I select in measure 5 for one note before returning to legato. As the test piece plays, hopefully you can see how Dorico controls the selections.

In measure 6 I used the Natural playing technique to “stop” the flutter-tongue. I’ve read many older posts here that recommend using Natural to end a playing technique. Not doing so results in additive behavior on top of flutter-tongue. But my question: is there a newer/better way to use mutual exclusion groups in the expression map to end flutter-tongue instead of inserting Natural into the score and hiding it? I haven’t figured out if that is possible with the way I’m using Kontakt and UACC KS.

Link to video (no audio)

my first question would be why you want to have a separate channel for flutter-tongue instead of simply using the keyswitch? I understand that Spitfire Kontakt libraries like this one (unlike the newest generation which don’t use Kontakt) do allow patch blending through UACC KS but I can’t see the point in your example as you can’t merge f.t with anything else and my instant reaction – quite possibly erroneous – is that you’re only making life more complicated!

Leaving that aside, I’m not aware of anything new that you’re not already aware of. If your p.t is a “direction” i.e that it persists until cancelled which would normally be the case with f.t, then you’d generally need to stop it with either a “nat” or a playing technique which is in an exclusion group together with f.t.

I’ve always had lots of key switching problems with the Spitfire Kontakt instruments, regardless of method used. There has been threads about such problems here as well.

Last time I needed a Spitfire instrument I think I had to add (the equivalent of) a Natural in every articulation’s NOTE OFF EVENTS… in order to avoid double articulations. TIming adjustmens had no effect, neither had mutual exclusion groups… I’m not saying it’s a universal fix, but it did at least save my day back then…

I thought there had been some discussion of this. I could never reproduce them with the BBC SO and the issues seem to be restricted to the Spitfire Kontakt libraries — perhaps that’s why Spitfire are moving away from Kontakt. Are these problems Dorico specific or likely to occur with any DAW? How exactly does the UACC KS help in a notation environment as the feature is barely mentioned in the manual until the appendix.

I’d guess so… never had a problem with BBC and their own player. Otherwise I had the same problems with Human Playback (Finale) as I’ve had with Dorico. One might think that Finale would be old and inferior in this respect, but I’m more inclined to think that Kontakt is the culprit.
Never found a solution for HP, but with Dorico the solution I mentioned above worked for me.

Thank you very much for your inputs. The advantage of UACC KS is that it provides a consistent catalog of reference IDs for articulations and techniques, and allows layering of multiple selections at the same time. But if all patches for a given instrument or player group could be accessed within a single interface it would be much better and I could stick with key switches.
I found a solution to my original question that does not involve using Natural. By extending the handles of the flutter-tongue playing technique to specific notes with Shift-Alt-right (or left) and then modifying the matching playback technique to have an Articulation Type = attribute, it worked. i.e. the next playing technique wasn’t combined with flutter-tongue, and flutter-tongue was applied only to the designated notes. That’s the end result I was hoping for.

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It sounds quite involved but I’m glad you’ve managed to find a library-specific solution that works for you!