Niente on VSL strings?

Dorico
1

Apologies if this has been discussed; I searched.

We’re trying to get niente to work with VSL SYNCRON-ized Solo Strings. We were told by VSL that it requires using the CC11 lane.

  1. Is there a way around doing this manually?
  2. If this has to be done manually, is there a way to shorten the process? Copy-paste CC values, or another macro method to shorten the process?

There’s a ton of niente in this particular piece (and others upcoming), and we’d like to think strategically about.

2

Just thinking off the top of my head… Could you perhaps create a niente technique and set to control dynamic on cc11, limiting the range to 1?

3

Nothing I can think about. The Dynamic Range control of the Synchron Player is limited in range compared to the Vienna Instruments player, and doesn’t allow going to zero.

It would be great to have a way to insert bundles of data at a particular position, in Dorico. One would then be able to add a CC11 fade-out and then a fade-in where needed.

Paolo

4

In theory there’s a very simple fix for this sort of situation-- simply set the CC11 secondary dynamic to the same range as the primary CC1. In practice, as I quickly found out, it doesn’t work like this with the Vienna Solo strings as overall the quieter dynamics are far too soft. I actually scale CC11 to 65-100 which gives good results in general but of course doesn’t help with niente.

Janus idea is an interesting one but as we generally want to fade to niente, I’m just wonder how a sudden jump from the lowest CC1 level to niente could easily be achieved with this library.

Large scale copy and paste of controller lane data is still fairly limited in Dorico and of course the developers are aware of this. It really doesn’t help that even if you copy a whole bar using the system track, the CC11 controller data is not copied which in my book is a bug. Perhaps we should wait for v4 where there will almost certainly be some improvements, albeit probably not immediately to the level that what Paolo (and me) is hoping for.

5

I’ve sometimes had to (last resort) use CC7 (volume ) as a primary or secondary where it doesn’t matter whether the VST wants to go to zero or not - its gonna…

As far as dko22’s comment about the dynamics being quieter overall, you may be able to adjust it out to the curve you want with the Dynamics curve in Playback Options.

6

yes I had thought of that but have not yet managed to find a setting that seems to work ideally. I’m all ears if anyone has concrete suggestions.