I’m working on a piece for string quartet involving glissandi between chords and I have problems getting the playback to work. I have searched the forum and other discussion groups and from the answers there it seems that Dorico approximates glissandi by doing chromatic steps (there is a Playback type setting for glissando that I can set to continous, but it does not seem to work here) . What I have found is that for half or whole step glissandi I get a real glissando, but for larger intervals it is quite erratic what the result is - especially with serial glissandi. Sometimes it will overshoot the target and for serial half or whole step gliss I get a new attack in the middle of all notes except for the first one. This is an example where the first line is what I wrote and the second line is what Doricos playback (using Halion) produces:
So in the third bar the playback overshoots by one note, does a stepwise “gliss” the correct interval to the next note, but since it starts too high it sounds like a grace not is put on the target. Is this a problem of Halion being limited to 1 step gliss or is it a Dorico thing? Are there other sound libraries (that don’t cost a fortune) which are able to give me the correct playback of long glissandi? I’m not too concerned with the quality of the actual sounds as long as the gliss problem is solved. I tried to divide the longer glissandi into several shorter ones, but it still sounds wrong.
VSL libraries allow you to programme one octave pitchbend glissandi. Provided you set it both in the Expression Map and the Synchron player to 12 semitones, it will work fine. I’d recommend the newer Synchron solo strings. NotePerfomer also works but the solo strings are nothing like as good as VSL in tonal quality, although I actually quite like its glissandi. NP is a good bit cheaper, though.
Orchestral Tools SINE doesn’t support 12 tone pitchbend properly and while Kontakt theoretically can, in practise, libraries using it tend not to reliably (like Spitfire). So the choice isn’t that wide. Of course even if the libraries do support it, if you forget to enable it in the EM - the default is only 2-- , then it won’t work anyway.
just to add for the OP that if you’re interested in modelled instruments like SWAM or Sample Modelling then it does work – for much the same reason as NotePerformer. However among conventional sample libraries only VSL can reliably do proper glissandi as far as I’m aware – and VSL are relatively straightforward to programme and use compared to some.
