Hello everyone, I’m new to Dorico. I’m very excited about the features coming from Sibelius. I’m having a few issues setting up an expression map however using spitfire libraries in Kontact. I want to add an articulation that isn’t included in one of the articulation sets. Legato Portamento isn’t available. I read that you could load a second instance of the spitfire library in the open version of kontact, lock to UACC and then just assign the legato portamento to slide in the expression map. I did this, but it doesn’t seem to be working. I have both articulation sets set to the same midi channel.
Is this possible? How are you dealing with having access to articulations that aren’t in a predefined spitfire set? There is no way to make your own articulation preset in Kontact is there?
Thanks! This is very confusing. I’ve done a lot of searching and couldn’t really find anything that connected it all together.
Welcome to the forum, @future-relics. I’m afraid I’m not knowledgeable enough about the way Spitfire and Kontakt work to be able to offer any specific advice, but you won’t be able to practically assign two channels in Kontakt to the same instrument in Dorico without using independent voice playback (and then writing the music intended for one channel in one voice, and the music for the other in a second voice, which you then map in Play mode), and that is probably overkill.
Is there another way to reconfigure the patch so that you can access the portamento technique you’re after with e.g. a MIDI controller or a keyswitch?
Hi Daniel, thanks so much for the reply. Really excited about Dorico!
Can you direct me a little more on the idea of assigning different voices to different channels on the same instrument? This could be helpful for me in a couple of situations.
I’m reaching out to Spitfire to see if there is a way to add or change articulations. After a lot of research I couldn’t find a way to customize the preset selections.
If the only solution for now is setting specific articulations (ones I don’t use quite as often) to a different voice, then that’s doable compared to creating a new instrument with just those articulations.
some Spitfire string libraries (perhaps even all the recent ones including my BBC Core) can assign velocity 1-19 to portamento. So you simply drag the velocity slider down to this range in the Play window. If you want to show it in the score then you must hide the playback in the “Properties” window in Write mode
In Kontakt, you can create an “Instrument bank”. It’s a container with 128 slots. In each slot, you can put any patch you want : thus creating your own articulation set. Then, in your expression map, you access each slot of your instrument bank with a “Program Change” action. Beware, instrument bank slots are indexed from 1 to 128 while Program Change from 0 to 127 !
Method 2
If in a given Kontakt instance you prefer to use different channels for your articulations, you can still access them through Channel change action (more info here).
Bonus method
If for whatever reason you want to dedicate a voice of your instrument to a particular patch, just activate the “Enable independant playback of voices” switch of chosen instrument in the Play tab (more info here).
I learnt methods 1 and 2 by studying @MiloDC Spitfire SSO playback template shared here. I don’t know which method is most efficient RAM-wise (probably using instrument banks ?), personally I only use method 1 currently. Bonus method was discussed here.
However, as @dko22 mentioned, if your are talking of Spitfire SSO, portamento legato should be in standard articulation sets of all instruments (woodwinds, brass and strings), using “legato” patch with low velocities.