Expression Maps

[SampoKasurinen]

Just to make sure, CSS uses the note velocity to determine the speed of the legato. This is from the CSS manual:

“There are three velocity zones: 0-64, 65-100, and 101-127, which correspond to three legato speeds respectively: slow, medium and fast, as picture below. (-) at the default setting of 20, a portamento slide will only trigger when a legato transition is performed at or below a velocity of 20.”

I’ve also proposed earlier how the EM could be developed so that the legato could be automated:

@sakasuri

@Daniel at Steinberg

Thanks for the feedback. I hope that in future it will indeed be possible to specify a tick offset to either anticipate or delay the onset on a per-switch basis in expression maps.

For proper control over legato, the note start offset would need to be set in milliseconds rather than ticks in the expression maps (since length of the ticks depends on the tempo of the project).

At least Cinematic Studio Strings (for which I’ve been making expression maps) has three different legato transitions: fast (100 ms), medium (250ms) and slow (333 ms). It would be great if Dorico could automatically pick the correct transition and offset based on how much time there is for the legato transition to happen. Therefore I have suggested that expression maps could have a condition for the length of the previous note as well as the length of the current note.

There would also need to be a condition that tells if the note is the first of a legato chain: in that case no offset is needed.

I have also a suggestion of how this could be achieved: the note length parameter could also have a value for “rest”, similar to the other values (“short”, “very short”…). “Previous note length” -condition would then look at the note length parameter few ticks before the note: if it would return a “rest”, that would mean the note is the first of a legato chain.