I am looking for Expressions maps for the saxophones of VSL (VI PRO) and Dorico. I think there is none, or it is well hidden. VSL does not. Neither did Articulation Preset (Riot). Babylonwave does not take care of Dorico. Nor does Steinberg.
It’s not feasible for the small team at Steinberg to create expression maps and playback templates for every sound library that’s out there on the market. The team at VSL do provide Dorico playback templates for a number of their libraries, and perhaps with sufficient demand from their customers they will consider producing playback templates and expression maps for their saxophones.
I’ve been trying to come up with something but also drew a blank. VSL only support a few of the the Synchron(-ized) libraries and Symphonic Riot only the VI ones. Saxophones are of course featured in a cut down version in the SE vol2 – there there are templates from VSL, myself and others for the Synchron-ized version but I know of nothing for VI. Steinberg have done Cubase maps (which can be used as a starting point) for some of the VI set but not the saxophones.
Can you not persuade Symphonic Riot to do the VI ones?
It wouldn’t be profitable for him (he confirmed it to me). Too few interested customers. It would be up to us to convince VSL, as Daniel says above. But maybe the saxophones are not selling well (despite their extraordinary quality), or VSL is preparing a Syncron version, for which there is already a mapped base. I don’t know. I think it’s the responsibility of instrument creators to make them playable in playback. It should be in the price. Basically, we can’t say that VSL takes care of that well. That said, if you ask VSL for saxophones, it won’t hurt. You can approve my thread about this.
I guess that VSL will eventually bring out a synchron-ized version of the saxophones if they don’t do a completely new library. I know that VI adherents often don’t think that the synchron player is a step forward and I can understand why but community and especially official support is moving in that direction and I jumped onboard even if many of my “legacy” (i.e Sibelius) works have been written for VI collections. In every case, I find the Dorico conversion with the synchron-ized versions better —even compared to using Symphonic Riot’s templates — though that is probably party due to Dorico’s superior playback support.
It is certain that the Synchonized versions are a step forward, even if we lose important elements (the extraordinary Voice that I use a lot in creation). Especially for Dorico users, if I understand you. But the price is too high for the owners of the VI. We basically financed the creation of the Synchonized versions. We should pay the difference between the price paid for the VI and the asking price for the Synchonized, since basically it is an upgrade. But this is not the case.