Hey Guys !
I have some troubles with my expression maps ( orchestral music )… Let’s say I want to write some pizzicatos, I made my expression map for CSS, so I write a note, I change its articulation to pizzicato in the expression map, which is great. But if I write a new note, it will not be a pizzicato, it will be unassigned.
Also, it doesn’t work the opposite way, I can’t select an articulation, an then write everything so every note will be this articulation. In my Cubase, every new note is unassigned.
Also, when I select my notes, I don’t even hear the right playback. If I click on a pizzicato note to hear it, I will hear a long note instead ( which is my default unassigned articulation ).. It’s kind of annoying..
The only way for me to be quick is to write by just copy and pasting, to keep the articulations of the previous notes.. Which is really not great
Do you have a solution ? Thanks a lot !!
I usually just write the entire melody line first and then do the expressions.
After I input all the notes I use cmd + A (control + A on windows) to select all the notes I just wrote and click with the pen tool on the expression I want. This gives all the notes the expression I selected.
Then I listen and make refinements, by changing specific expressions/velocity/ccs while listening to the whole line I wrote.
The best way is if you can just play it in live. A lot of composers I know, buy an additional cheap Midi keyboard with a one or two octave range, and set it up to start at C-2. And then hit record, one hand playing a melody, the other changing the expressions before each note on the additional Midi Keyboard.
(But this isn’t easy and takes a lot of time to get used to, especially with libraries like CSS that have a very high latency for live playing)
Are you creating the Expression Map articulations as Directions? It sounds like you may be creating them as Attributes which are per-note properties (if you set the attribute on one note then it won’t be set on the next one). Directions are ‘sticky’ so they affect all notes after them until you come to an articulation that resets it.