Hi, I’ve searched the forum, but I didn’t find this request in earlier post.
It is possible already to apply as a property of the notes after a switch a delay in an expression map. Very nice!
My request: is it possible to give the first note after the switch a different delay.
Some legato patches (e.g. with Synchron Duality Strings) have a long transition and need a longer negative delay then the first note of the legato patch (which doesn’t start with a transition part).
I did not know that. My impression was that a delay for the note was possible, but not for the switch! Will have to try…
Sorry, I didn’t express my self clearly. I meant: It is possible already to apply as a property of the notes after a switch a delay. It is not possible to apply a delay in the switch itself. I will improve the text. Thank you for reacting!
These controls in the Expression Map editor are the only controls for delaying switches. You can’t add a switch delay in the Key Editor to a note.
Sorry for the confusion. When you place a playing technique with a delay in a staff, all the notes after the playing technique in that staff have that delay. My request is: is it possible that the first note after that playing technique in the staff can have a different delay than the other notes for the reason I meant in my request. I hope that I could made things more clear so.
Ben, I’m super dense today, but again: This setting only delays the onset of notes (negative for slow attack strings and choirs for example?), but does not determine when during the note the switch is activated, right?
Now you mention it, I’m not entirely sure. I thought it was for applying late or early triggers, e.g. CCs and KSes, before or after the start of a note, but looking at the documentation, I could be wrong, so I’ll shut up now.
No it is not. What you can do to work around this is you can create a new playback technique and playing technique called “First Note” and create a new base switch to match Legato + First Note with the delay that the first note should have, and then manually add the playing technique “First Note” over the first note of every legato phrase and hide it.
Brilliant solution! Thanks
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This is correct. What determines when the switch itself is sent is in the expression map under “Playback Options Overrides”, the “Expression map switches before notes” setting in ticks. This configures how many MIDI ticks before the note that the keyswitch is sent and affects all techniques under the expression map. The default is normally 10 ticks before the note, but with some libraries this might be too late, and with other libraries (Garritan JABB) it is actually too early and the jazz ornaments won’t always trigger properly unless this setting is reduced from 10 ticks to something smaller so it is sent closer to when the note starts.
However this thread does not have anything to do with that setting/feature. It is instead about moving the notes themselves backwards in time with negative delay. It got confused due to misunderstanding of the original post.
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Yes, that would work.
It’s also possible to adjust the start and end playback positions of individual notes in the properties panel. That gives more fine grained control, at the expense of not being able to update the setting globally.
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Of course, this is the other way of doing it (and you can manipulate this setting in the piano roll itself by switching to “sounding durations” with the button in the piano roll pane).
The downside of adjusting the start playback position manually though is that it is tempo-dependent - meaning if you decide to change the tempo, all of these will be wrong, because the start offset is not in millseconds but is instead in some kind of unit of musical time, so tempo changes will throw this off and will cause these notes to sound too early or too late. In reality the sample libraries should have a very consistent onset delay in milliseconds. So it should be easier and less error-prone to do this in the map with milliseconds and have it always guaranteed to be correct instead of editing the individual notes sounding durations and having to eyeball it and remembering to compensate for whatever the tempo is at the time (the start offset should be a smaller negative value at lower tempi and a larger negative value at higher tempi to result in the same number of millseconds).
Very true.
I do find myself using different adjustments for different notes quite often to make things sound more human, especially for transitions to and from legato.
I think there’s a role for both. I’m glad we have the choice.
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