Trio Broz: Solo Violin quick performance tips (FAQ 1.1 revision) A short note about the performing of legato lines with our instrument.
Trio Broz: Solo Violin ofers a quite accessible way to emulate the sound of a violin. Great results are easy to achieve. Nevertheless the inner complexity of the engine should be understood in order to get the full control over any parameters of your legato line. While working on and with this instruments I'm still learning a lot of things: this is just an informal way to share my experiences and some quick tricks to adapt the violin to your preferences. INTRODUCTION#0 We sampled four dynamic layers for all the long articulations (accented note, crescendo, sustain, decrescendo, non-vibrato) and one dynamic layer for the legatos (fngered legato – slurred legato). This dynamic limitation was due to the sampling time at our disposal and moreover it allowed us to contain the size of the library. MAIN BEHAVIOR: According to the modwheel position, when you frst play a note on a vibrato/non vibrato articulation, you play one of the four dynamic layers. As you move the modwheel to change the current dynamic layer, the instrument smoothly changes between these layers. Then, when you are playing legato, the instrument switches to legato mode and uses just 1 dynamic layer. After a while the legato layer switches back to the sustain mode, in a phase which I call “transition” (I think I'd better rename it, to avoid confusion). To make this paper easier to read I'll name these two phases “SUSTAIN phase” and “LEGATO phase”. All the passages in this “legato trip” can be customized, according to the diferent needs and user's preferences. Many customizations are tradeofs between responsiveness and
1 [email protected] sound quality. So.... QUESTION #1 Wow, I like it, but I think that the legato is a bit slow to control. I want to play FAST! How can I do it? The instrument auto-adapts the speed of the legato crossfades according to the way in which you are playing. Specifcally, the overall max legato speed is set in this panel of the BEHAVIOR page:
If your note changes are faster than this value, the instrument will shorten it to be sure that the legato passage is clearly heard before the new note change. This happens dynamically and smoothly but if the legato speed change is irritating or compromising your performance you can simply lower the correspondent value in the BEHAVIOR page, for both vibrato and non-vibrato modes. At very low values the legato crossfades could sound a little bit more fake or abrupt: it's up to you to fnd the setting which suites better your necessities. QUESTION #2 I want more control over dynamics! Why the instrument has such a low dynamic excursion? Or wait, why now it has such an exaggerated dynamic range? How can I manage it? There are many inner dynamic controls in this instrument. Let's have a look. I will list them in order of importance:
First, take a look at the CONTROL page. On the right panel you have shown the modwheel values at which the dynamic layers of the long articulations in the SUSTAIN phase will interpolate. Setting the upper number to 127 will exclude the upper f layer.
Again, setting to 0 the last number will exclude the pp layer. The smooth time value controls how fast the instrument will apply your Modwheel gestures.
Second, at the COMPENSATOR page there is a Dynamic Control Engine compressor. What it does? According to the analyzed data – which is used to perform various crossfading functions in the instrument – the DCE compressor makes the lower dynamics to be more evident by “pushing them up” a bit. When maximized, all the samples will sound as they are playing at the same volume. While we were working on this project we realized that if we automated this parameter with the modwheel we could get a better control ove the dynamics, so we included the “mw control” slider. This parameter allows the modwheel to modulate the DCE compressor, enabling the user to have a greater control over the dynamic of the instrument.
Third, click on the PREFERENCES page. Here you can set the dynamic behavior of the LEGATO phase. Since the dynamic in the LEGATO phase is emulated you can set the overall excursion in the dynamic volume in the “dynamics volume” box. Usually a range of -18 / -12 dB works quite well. The “pp subtle artifacts panel” is a subtle synthesized way to emulate the lower dynamics. It emphasizes a bit the upper harmonics of the lower dynamics but with some slight random volume changes which are typical of the human way of performing pianissimo dynamics. Again, the last box if checked will avoid the legato to last long and make it to switch back on the SUSTAIN phase in a shorter time than the ones set in the BEHAVIOR page.
All the efects of the SOUND page have a great impact on the instrument dynamics so we've added the “mw control” setting which allows the Modwheel to slightly infuence the amount of the efect applied. QUESTION 3# Ok, but what about that re-bow noise which happens in the middle of my nice legato line? I don't want it! I hate it!
In my own opinion the re-bow is one of the things which makes this violin to sound real, but I defnitively agree on the fact that it can be irritating, because most of the times it happens outside a regular beat or just before a change of note. to avoid it we've included a “force transition” key which will fade the legato back to the SUSTAIN by overriding the legato duration value. If you press this key just after your legato note, the SUSTAIN transition will replace the currently playing legato note and let you to enjoy your full long note. Instead, you can use the re-bow key-switch to force the instrument to play a re-bow. QUESTION 4# Ok, but I don't like this legato/sustain method, why can't this library just work in a similar way of the others? Why should I be forced to share your idea? Normally the “old” way to handle legato – which works quite well for big ensembles, where the phasing between instruments is naturally present – is to make a short legato transition and to go back to the sustain as soon as possible. This is what actually happens for the non-vibrato mode: in order to avoid the vibrato of the LEGATO phase, the instrument switches back to the SUSTAIN as fast as possible. By the way, our SUSTAIN/LEGATO idea comes out by looking to other libraries, realizing that the most natural sounding and expressive libraries let a natural, full note after the legato. We think this is a great way to avoid the instrument to sound dull and sterile and to avoid as much as possible the phasing artifacts of layering samples when going back to the SUSTAIN phase. Please note that this technique need much more time to sample, since every note in the instrument should be sampled once for each of the legato intervals!
...But in this library we even ofer the ability to behave in the old-fashion-ready-to- sample way! We love the moonlight! How? Just trim down the “Legato Duration” time to a smaller value. If the transition to the SUSTAIN part is too fast, please change this:
QUESTION #5
My CPU can't handle your violin! What can I do?
You can handle how precisely the engine works by setting its accuracy in the preferences page. Eventually remove the reverb by setting it OFF in its menu or by lowering the knob to zero value. Or substitute it with another of your liking. QUESTION #6 How can I customize the sound of this instrument? You have controls over the diferent microphones and some included efects, but apart from the microphone controls, which can have a great impact over the sound of the instrument, I suggest you to bypass all the Kontakt stuf and replace it with your favorites mastering tools. Kontakt is famous for having some so-and-so FX sections (like the convolution reverb as well as the included Impulse Responses of the instrument). So, instead of pre-edit the samples with external tools which could sound right in one occasion but fake in most of the others, I would prefer to keep the sound of the instrument quite clean and to let the user to apply his favorite efects on the signal chain. In this way the user is able to sculpt the sound to his own liking. QUESTION #8 And what about the pitch wheel? The pitch wheel function deserves a long answer, but let's make it simple: Lower it to get a crescendo attack and rise it to have an accented attack. You can decide the duration of the crescendo by lowering the pitch wheel a bit less of more. The more you lower it the longer the crescendo is. Use it to make a slurred legato instead of a normal fngered legato. If you rise it you'll get an horrible emulation of the arc change. Please avoid it I need to remove it because it sounds horrible. It works right 1 times over 100. And lower it when releasing a note to get a decrescendo. Lower it a bit less to get a faster decrescendo. Remember: it is better to use the right pitch wheel amount for performing crescendos/decrescendos than using the modwheel to force a similar fgure. You can indeed enhance the efect by riding the modwheel, but often it's better to keep the modwheel steady until the phrase has ended, to avoid phasing artifacts in a very important part of the legato phrase. QUESTION #9 Can you explain me a bit more about the DCE? What is it? The compensator is part of the DCE engine and it's our way to connect the diferent samples in the smoothest and most natural way. The DCE adapts the volume of the incoming note to the previous one and gently brings the volume of the new sample to its actual dB level. You can see how it works, by looking at the lowest tiny bar under the VU-Meter when the instrument is performing.
e amount of the DCE is proportional to the diference in level of the samples when they crossfade and the user can decide how much it acts using the “compensator amount” slider. While the overall speed of the compensator behavior is defned by the “compensator time” slider.
QUESTION #10 Does the velocity do anything useful in playing legato lines? Yes. The velocity is optionally linked to the compensator in the “velocity –> compensator” slider (as you an see above). At velocity = 64 the compensator just acts in a standard way, while on higher or lower velocities it infuences the compensator amount, by pushing or lowering the level of the incoming note. This is a useful device to tweak legato passages to perfection and to give a little more responsive feel when playing legato in realtime.
QUESTION #11 Can you please end this FAQ? Don't be ofended but it's quite boring. Can I avoid all of this tedious reading? Yes, you can, but the secrets of solo string master will be unknown to you. In any case we provided some ready-to-use presets to let lazy, but more often “time-stretched”, musicians like you to get ready and to have fun playing this instrument! :-)
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