Is there a reason why e.g. the staccato -playing technique needs to reset to natural during rests notated in score?
This means that Dorico is sending a lot of unnecessary keyswitch -messages that can make the playback quite uneven and unpredictable (in these kind of situations:)
Would it make sense to switch articulation only at the point where a new note with a different articulation comes up (and ignore the rests)?
In what sound library are you finding that these “additional” key switches are causing problems? If you had alternating staccato and non-staccato notes, then you would require precisely that many key switches, and I’d be surprised that simply sending a note to a virtual instrument would cause it to play back in an unstable way. It is, after all, what virtual instruments are meant to do…
This problem was actually with Cinematic Studio Strings - I have a script which is correcting latency for different articulations. If the tempo is fast, the script for some reason cannot keep up with all the keyswitches sent to it (in the example above).
But I feel that even the library itself is struggling a bit with these very fast changes between articulations. I think it’s designed more with the idea that the staccato articulation should be left on for the whole phrase (like you would have it in a DAW).
A lot of kontakt based libraries are struggling keeping up with key switching… There is a reason Spitfire and Orchestral Tools among others developed their own players…
There are actually two more occasions where I have had problems with rests triggering articulations:
I wanted to have my expression map for Cinematic Studio Strings so that legato -articulation would be triggered when there is a slur in notation and non legato -articulation when there are no slurs. But this doesn’t work well with CSS, as I noticed in these kind of situations:
What happens there is that Dorico sends a keyswitch for non legato (natural) right at the end of the phrase. But CSS has also sampled the sound of the hall after the legato note is released. When Dorico triggers natural keyswitch at the end of the phrase, that note release reverb will come from the non-legato patch of CSS - which is a completely different sample and sounds very unnatural. Therefore I had to default the CSS expression map to legato articulation (both natural and legato playing techniques will trigger legato patch in CSS) - which of course is not ideal.
Switching to natural right after the end of a legato phrase has also caused problems with dynamic controller "jumping"to a default value. But this I have already reported in an earlier post:
A kinda workaround I found for this is to use a Spiccato playing technique (the one that allows you to select a range of notes or be a “latch state” until you input a natural) The first note of the selection will be spiccato instead of staccato but it won’t cause it to switch back to natural at every rest.
