BOTH! Best Way to Manage Articulations (Virtual Orchestra)

When setting up your virtual orchestra templates, you don’t have to choose between keyswitches or track-per-articulation-you can have both!
Keyswitch tracks are great for quickly writing music while taking advantage of all of our available articulations. But individual articulation tracks let you refine details, especially by layering multiple articulations simultaneously.
This video will walk you through what that setup looks like across your DAW and sample player plug-ins (VSTs, etc.). I show demos using Cubase and Kontakt, but these same techniques will work with many other DAWs that have similar articulation features to Expression Maps (like Articulation Sets in Logic, Sound Variations in Studio One, or Reaticulate in Reaper).
⏱️ Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:37 QUICK DEMO (What both gets you)
03:11 String Runs!
03:39 Keyswitches (The two types)
05:20 HOW TO (Solve the layering problem)
08:16 Three Gotchas
10:36 What Next?
🛠️ HOW TO Steps:
[1] LOAD - multi-timbral sample player w/ 1 articulation per MIDI channel (separated to allow layering)
[2] SET UP - DAW keyswitches w/ MIDI channel routing (sends each articulation to the right MIDI channel)
[3] CREATE - both keyswitch track & individual articulation tracks (absolutely possible to have multiple MIDI tracks that output to the same channels)
🚧 If you get stuck trying this technique out yourself, make sure you check out the 8:16 Three Gotchas chapter (#1 conflicting controllers, #2 extra RAM cost, #3 mono-timbral plug-ins). Or drop me a note below, and I’ll try to help out if I can!

[@ns1983za]

Holy moly! I've never heard sampled shorts like in those trumpets before.

[@ThePickledOnions]

This is about as good as an explanation as I've seen

[@BillMcFadden]

NIce contribution to the community. You're software engineering mindset shows through :)

[@barndollarmusic]

Thanks, Bill, appreciate that :)

[@DavidComdico]

Excellent content and high production values. Well done.👍

[@barndollarmusic]

Thanks, David! Hope this was useful

[@andressarmiento384]

This is actually fantastic, gonna implement it on my own template right away. The presentation and video editing was really nice too, great job and thank you so much!

[@barndollarmusic]

Appreciate that! Hope the approach helps in your composing workflow

[@soundbeatproductions5732]

This is a fantastic tutorial. A much better way than I have been doing key switching. It's much more efficient using separate midi tracks and switching between them using key switches. Thanks so much.

[@barndollarmusic]

Appreciate that! Glad you found it useful

[@faru-music]

Great content and well explained

[@TWDub]

Cool vid. I'd like to also recommend Expression Maps to anyone who prefers keeping everything in a single track (and when using a DAW which supports the function, such as Cubase). Using Expression Maps helps keep everything in one track, and allows you to simply highlight a MIDI note and select the specific key switch articulation you want, and it will assign that key switch to that note. This way you can have all the key switches you want active and ready for us without having to spend more CPU/RAM to load up all the individual tracks.

[@barndollarmusic]

Thanks, and absolutely agree that Expression Maps etc are worth the setup time for that one track approach too

[@ricgus3]

Subbed! Great tips and great energy from you. Just got this recommended :)

[@barndollarmusic]

Thanks, Rickard, really appreciate that!

[@DMIXMusic]

Woah, surprised you don't have more subs. Great video!

[@barndollarmusic]

Hey thanks! I'm still pretty new at all this, so glad it was useful

[@DMIXMusic]

@@barndollarmusic Keep going consistently and you will get there. You def have the quality!

[@barndollarmusic]

Appreciate that, Dylan! Looks like you're doing some really interesting stuff on your channel, so I'll absolutely check more out + learn a few things

[@shubus]

Wow! A truckload of great info here! Will have to find a way to implement all this as I primarily work in Dorico and then export to Cubase. And I couldn't agree more with the idea of starting out with keyswitches and then tweaking with individual articulations. It took a lot of time to create all those extra tracks with single articulations, but it surely has been worth it.

[@barndollarmusic]

I think that notation -> DAW direction is harder than DAW -> notation, though both are still more painful than I hope they'll be in the not too distant future. But one workflow is to put all notes for an instrument onto the keyswitch track, start assigning articulations in the key editor (tip: I always use attributes, not directions with expression maps to make that easier), and then you can move down to individual articulation tracks as I show in this video whenever you need to layer multiple articulations simultaneously.

[@shubus]

@@barndollarmusic This is why I appreciate your methodology as I'm increasingly finding the need to layer multiple articulations.

[@andrewventham]

I don't have Abbey Road One, but in the BBC SO plug-in, you have the option to use midi channels for switching between articulations. The only snag is that the string sections have more articulations than there are channels!

[@barndollarmusic]

That's good to know, thanks Andrew!

[@andrewventham]

@@barndollarmusic The other snag is that it seemingly ignores the channel information on CC data, merging it all together, as you've alluded to in the video. I have a suggestion for an alternative approach, which is to have e.g. the shorts loaded up on one VE Pro channel and the longs on another, and give each their own midi channel. You can still access them both from a single Cubase track when playing in, switching between the two midi channels as needed via the expression map; but then if you want to stack a long and a short together, you can just add a duplicate Cubase track and record one of the articulations into that, with the added bonus of separate expression data per stacked articulation (i.e. track/channel).

[@barndollarmusic]

@@andrewventham ah, if controllers aren't separated then I don't feel as bad about having picked on the Spitfire player :). I like your idea on splitting longs + shorts that way, since that should cover most of the common layering and get most of the benefits of full separation.

[@andrewventham]

@@barndollarmusic I've discovered that running a "fully articulated" BBC SO instrument on two duplicate VE Pro channels doesn't require any more resources than splitting those articulations between those channels (at least within the same VE Pro instance). I'm setting up my template with these duplicate channels disabled by default, to save on CPU, but other than that it pretty much makes the BBC SO instruments multi-timbral, similarly to a Kontakt multi.

[@princegrwl]

Great and very useful video Eric. I took this hybrid approach initially as well, but then switched completely to key switches as I found myself accidentally layering say Violin1 Staccato and pizzicato when doing one articulation per track, which isn't realistic as a section can't play two articulations simultaneously in non-divisi. So even though everything seemed good in the DAW, when preparing for actual orchestral recording, It made me hit a brickwall.

[@barndollarmusic]

Thanks! And sure, I understand why -- if you're writing for studio/stage players, you have to make sure parts are notation + player practical. Hopefully you don't need quite as much "realism" from the virtual orchestra demo in those cases, so that might be the right tradeoff for you.

[@princegrwl]

@@barndollarmusic Agreed. For cases where its not going to be recorded by live orchestra, this hybrid approach of keyswitches + one Art/track is excellent. ❤️

[@mycar4321]

Thanks for going through a giving an example of how to switch between articulation methods. I appreciate it a lot. Also I've been looking up info and watching others give a demo on the Tecontrol bbc2. I was wondering if I should get the first bbc1 with only breath and bite or bbc2 with added nod and tilt. My question is do you use the nod and tilt much when recording?

[@barndollarmusic]

Thanks! With the breath controller, honestly I mostly just use breath alone.

[@mycar4321]

@@barndollarmusic Okay thanks. I think I'll get the bbc1 then. Save myself $100. 🙂

[@ivanyokhna]

By the way, is one instance of Kontakt not overload single CPU ? Instead of loading 5-6 Kontakt instances?
(Good videos, thanks!)

[@barndollarmusic]

Splitting articulations into separate Kontakt instruments (within the same Kontakt multi plug-in instance) certainly uses more RAM and CPU than one Kontakt instrument with multiple articulations, if that's what you mean? Or if you meant splitting those separated articulations across more Kontakt multis (plugin instances) rather than one, then I definitely don't do that -- across a full orchestral template, there are plenty of separated plugin instances to divide load across CPU threads, so I'd be surprised if there was any performance benefit to more instance splitting per instrument.

[@a.t.onthebeat2016]

Can you do this with the free kontakt player?

[@barndollarmusic]

Absolutely! Nothing here is sampler specific, so this type of setup works to manage articulations in any sample library. (The one detail that matters is whether a sample player lets you load articulations on separate MIDI channels within one plugin instance, a.k.a. is "multi-timbral". Im not 100% sure, but I think the free Kontakt player still supports multis?)

[@koothka]

There is a strange impact or clic at the very beginning 0:00 of your nice and cool video. If you can remove it's would improve it.

[@barndollarmusic]

It starts off with a drum hit, if that's what you mean?