How to activate portamento?

[chimp_spanner]

Hey guys! I've got Shreddage II and Shreddage II IBZ running on Kontakt 5 in Cubase 8.5 Pro. I've created an expression map for every articulation and they all work except portamento. Say I want to slide from E down an octave, should I set both the higher and lower notes of the slide to the portamento articulation? Or only the top, or only the bottom? And is it correct to strike the upper note, hold it, and then introduce the lower note and hold them both until the end of the slide?

Can't get it going for the life of me! Thanks very much in advance for any help!

- Paul

[zircon]

I'm not familiar with expression maps in Cubase... How do they work?

[chimp_spanner]

Expression maps just let you map all of the articulations into a set of attributes or directions that you can apply to a note, so if I select a note and choose mute, it triggers the key switch for that note without having to actually draw it in. Super useful as notes keep their key switch/artic when you move them around and copy/paste and stuff. As I said it seems to work for the basic articulations but not porta. If I were using key switches normally, how would I trigger porta? I'll just make another MIDI track without the expression map and do the slides on that track.

[zircon]

OK, first set Portamento to "VEL" mode. Here you can define the velocity trigger range. If you want it to trigger at any velocity, set it to 0 - 127.

Next, switch it to KEY mode and pick the keyswitch of your choice. Let's say you select A0.

Now, in KEY mode, when you hit the A0 keyswitch you have toggled portamento ON. Any two valid overlapping notes will trigger a portamento slide. What are valid notes?

1. The first note must be a sustain articulation, not a mute, tremolo, etc. (Naturally, the slides were sampled based on sustains.)

2. The notes must be overlapping. If you have a C2 and you want to slide to F2, the start of F2 must be sometime within the C2 note. This is what tells the engine you want to do a slide.