negative delay per articulation in exp maps

Its a common situation to have instruments, especially strings, where some articulations have more attack latency then others. This often has to be handled by non-quantizing and nudging certain articulations earlier in order to sound ok.

A great addition to Expression maps would be the ability to add a “delay” parameter, which could be negative and would automatically send midi events early per that setting, to make up for articulation-by-articulation differences in attack latency.

1 Like

Was just about to ask for the very same! I was hoping I had missed this one… but I guess it is not there yet - even in Cubase 11 :frowning:

Enthusiastic ditto.

This would change the way composers work with VST instruments. I really hate having a midi track for each articulation, but the delays in articulations are significant and if you want to stay on the grid, expression maps are pretty useless for most libraries.

1 Like

Bump. Negative delay per articulation in an expression map would be a much-needed feature for orchestral based patches that have different timings.

This video shows why composers would want negative track delay and why they are currently forced to use a separate track for each patch instead of using keyswitch or expression maps for this approach: Why You Should Quantize + Negative Track Delays Explained - YouTube

2 Likes

I actually tried routing from a “master” midi track into virtual midi track inputs that feed other midi tracks with different delay offsets for BBCSO…well, good news is it works, but the effect on CPU and already brittle Cubase stability is something that made me go back to prehistoric setup – at least Audiobro managed to program a really nice lookahead feature in their products. Let’s see if VST programmers will solve this problem before Steinberg does :smiley:

1 Like

Bumping this topic. This is a really important feature. Dorico has implemented it and it seems to be working REALLY well. C’mon Cubase team, get this going please!

1 Like

Bumping again as this is a really useful feature and can dramatically cut down on the number of tracks in larger orchestral templates.