I knew about it, and it’s clearly a restructuring of the distribution model. With neighborhood shops closing and distribution all made either via downloads or via a couple major shops selling online, there is no way of keeping the marketing division alive. I’m happy they actively managed to find a new job to their former employees.
Apart for this, I can’t frankly see how the doom of NI you are forecasting could solve my problem with playing quarter tones with external sounds libraries. If it can, I should obviously look for news about a similar fate expecting the other manufacturers.
I’ve done a test with VSL Vienna Instruments (non-Pro), inserted in Dorico without using VEPRO. VI (non-Pro) is VST3, so I was hoping that it could show the way for a Pro player coming in perspective.
Alas, no, even the VST3 plugin refuses to play quarter tones.
It’s not about simply being VST3 — support for Note Expression has to be programmed in, I imagine. Again, this isn’t magic: the reason it doesn’t work is because the developers didn’t care for it, as I’m sure you noticed after explicitly requesting it.
I did look into it to see whether I could roll my own samplers with Cabbage, but I don’t think Csound has native support for note expression, and I don’t think the amazing programmer who did most of the MIDI infrastructure is active as a developer anymore. I might try requesting it, just to see what happens, but I have no particular hope.
Thank you very much for your answer. Yes, it’s funny that most of new opera commissions, during the latest years (and more to come with all the pupils of Saariaho entering career) are more or less spectralists; yet there is still to find a way to make sound libraries react to written finer intervals. A niche, for sure, but for someone their niche.
Not entirely sure I agree, but that’s beside the point. What I would like to warn you against is thinking that any of the sample library companies — in fact, pretty much any musical technology company, broadly speaking — is working for you or your specific “market segment”, if you want to call it that (if it is even that). They really aren’t. We’ve always had to fashion our own tools, by and large. But then again, most composers who get an opera commission don’t rely on sample libraries, so there’s also that.
There is a MIDI Tuning Standard and there has been one since 1992. It supports 21 bits of resolution (0.0061 cents, well below the threshold of pitch differentiation of human hearing). It is supported by a variety of software and hardware. Unlike VST3 note expression and other proprietary plugin ‘standards’, MIDI RTS:
Can be stored in standard MIDI files
Can be used by hardware
Can travel over wires, including virtual wires like the IAC bus between applications
Can be parsed and handled by MIDI transforming scripts and tools, allowing them to map to e.g. pitch bend for instruments that don’t have native support
“Everyone should adopt VST3” might be a good answer for Steinberg but may not be the best answer for its customers.
Being an official MIDI standard (and having been there since the beginning), it could have the greatest chances to be implemented in more virtual instruments. Most hardware instrument manufacturers seem to have done it (I don’t know at which degree). I see there is already an extensive list of supported VIs – yet again, I don’t know how deeply developed.
It seems rather versatile, in allowing both a whole song tuning, section tuning change, and the change of individual notes. The schema for accidentals is quite easy, being just a strings like this:
F0 7F <device ID> 08 02 tt ll [kk xx yy zz] F7
Using MTS, VSL VIPRO can respond to global tuning messages sent by Logic at the beginning of a piece. Unfortunately, Logic can’t use microtones for each single note. I don’t know if VSL’s player would respond, but their silence on this issue is not promising. But, at least, partial support is there.
Supporting both standards (VST and MIDI) would open compatibility to many more instruments. The battle to have one of them implemented in the various VIs would probably be easier.
Paolo
Pjotr, sorry, I didn’t want to abuse of private messaging. But I see I abused of the public service.
As for the plugin, nothing particularly interesting. Squeaks, scratches, dissonances, odd and arcane sounds… obviously, nothing interesting for a musician!
I wonder if VST3 apps can include a “tuning compatibility mode”. That is, in parallel with VST3 messages, pitch bend and/or MTS can be sent. All standards would be covered, with VST3 messages still being the default/preferred type of messages.
You can write microtonal accidentals in Finale, and have Kontakt play them back - and in addition to Kontakt, any of the countless samplers and synths that use .scl, .tun., MTS or proprietary formats for microtuning (where each pitch gets its own MIDI note). Halion, some Steinberg synths, Pianoteq and NotePerformer are the only instruments that respond to the VST tuning parameters and it looks like we’re going to be stuck in this situation for a long time.
And the VST-tuned MIDI stays inside Dorico: it can’t be transferred to a DAW, even Cubase.
For quarter-tone notation with playback (or other small equal divisions) and sample libraries, Finale is still the best tool (unfortunately).
While working on a new spectral-inspired piece, I have again to face the issue of microtuning with instruments other than NotePerformer.
Something that would help a lot is the inclusion of Pitch Bend among the messages that an expression map can send from an entry. In this way, I could simply create a set of add-on techniques corresponding to the microtonal accidentals, to be hidden in the score.
This would not only be useful for the hurting dissonances of my music, but also for fine-tuning wind instrument’s pitch.
I know it’s a workaround, and that it requires setting the Pitch Bend range, but it can work, while waiting for a better solution.
Knowing your persistence and hard work in this space, and given that you were willing to consider CSound…
I might suggest working with Chuck music programming language- from Stanford University. Chuck naturally uses frequency rather than MIDI values anyway - what you do when a MIDI note is received in your Chuck “shred”, you pass the midi note to a Chuck function that returns a frequency and you pass that frequency on to synth. So it would be trivial to modify the frequency before you passed it on to the synth for different notes. One cool thing for spectral writing is that it wouldn’t have to be fixed, that it could vary or morph according to whatever rules you think up.
For micro-accidentals, with Chuck I think I would use Dorico to map them to a handy keyswitch, and use that inside chuck as a clue to modify the frequency for the duration of the keyswitch note. As Daniel said this would normally still be somewhat global, but at least there could be logic in chuck to use as a work around. (That in this song, in this section, I want to apply it to midi note 64 to 70, but not above 70) or (If two or more notes are playing, always apply it to the middle note) or whatever you think up.
The only VST I know for Chuck isn’t maintained either I think - but Chuck itself is very active as a stand alone that accepts MIDI or OSC. I know its no trouble for you to send MIDI to it as an external device. You could also send modified MIDI back out of Chuck to another library.
Yep, not the solution you wanted. But it wouldn’t surprise me if you found its possibilities and limitations to be a creative inspiration.
Gdball, thank you for pointing me towards something I didn’t know! But I have to say that, despite having started at 17 to program in Music V on a DEC PDP, and having attended several courses and conferences at the Ircam, I’ve never become an electronic composer.
I use Open Music to do my calculations on the generating materials, but then I switch to traditional notation. I’m an orchestral composer, using electronic supports only for composing. I’m just hoping that some of the innovations of the computer music world can be transferred to traditional notation in an easier way.
An interesting addition to this thread may be that Kontakt 7 will be MPE-compliant. Wondering if this means something, when using Dorico with libraries running in Kontakt.
I’m also curious about this topic, where is Dorico heading concerning that issue of microtones for VST3 instruments without note expression?
Just like Paolo I’m a user of conTimbre which is indeed a very “niche” sample library (more like a composer’s laboratory i’d say) but extremely expressive ! It does have its own mechanics for handling microtones very precisely, and yet conTimbre still cannot receive microtones from Dorico.
The developer explained the plugin, even though it’s VST3 format, is written in JUCE which does not expose the note expression to its users Real shame
The same way, I’m a user of SWAM instruments (sample modeling) which have a much wider audience and yet very flexible for everything “note based” I’d say. They are extremely light (it’s all physical model just like Pianoteq). Moreover, they have also a whole system to handle microtones since 10 years+, but the same way they cannot receive note expression in VST3. I guess their way of handling microtones is too far to reimplement everything with note expression.
That’s why I’d really hope Dorico would consider to add optional pitch bend support for microtones in VST3, even though I agree it is much less reliable as note expression…
No, AFAIK. Someone should make a VST3 plug-in that captures the stream of notes and VST expressions (the microtuning) and exports a MIDI file with MPE or MTS sysex tuning included. I bet that’s not going to happen any time soon.
People might get curious 
Real shame