Hi,
Let me just preface this by saying that the whole MIDI side of things is anything but my area of expertise, so it’s possible that there’s a very simple fix to this and I just don’t know what it would be called and so don’t know where to find it. Anyway, I was transcribing a piece (Geoffrey Burgon’s Narnia suite) where the opening has sustained mp tremolos in the strings:
The thing is that my preferred string library for the piece overall (the old Xsample Chamber Ensemble) gives very strong attacks on the start of each tremolo note. For comparison, here’s the above with Halion:
GPO5:
and Xsample:
I haven’t made any changes in the three versions except to switch playback template. Project file of those 8 bars in case it’s useful:
Burgon Narnia tremolos example.dorico (2.6 MB)
I was wondering if there’s any way of smoothing the sound out? Halion and GPO do also have slight accents at the start of each note (more noticeably with Halion), so it’s not entirely a question of the library, even if that’s clearly a big factor. The one thing I could think of was adding legatos between each note, which reduced the effect a tiny bit, but not to any real degree. I also tried changing the dynamic marks to pp just to see if that did anything, but that simply produced strong pp accents.
I sort of assume there might be something to be done in the key editor, but I don’t even know where to start with that, as in I don’t even know which part of the documentation would be useful in this case.
Any thoughts appreciated!
(Credit where credit is due: this is what it sounds like with an actual orchestra conducted by the composer.)