Bowing with Philharmonik

[idragosani]

I am taking a course in orchestration from Berklee and while the course tends to target Kontakt 3, it's open-ended enough to allow other sample sets to be used. I am using MP, and am wondering if there is a trick for getting a bowed note sound for repeating notes (apparently some orchestral sample sets have this). Otherwise the notes have kind of the machine gun effect and don't sound realistic. I tried setting CC#11 to subtly affect the attack by manipulating the level control but it still doesn't sound quite right.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[Shantar]

Hi.

I'm afraid that there is no such thing as RR (round robin) repeated patches in MP. If you only have MP I guess you could try and find two similar sounding staccato patches, assigning them each to their own miditrack. (You may have to tweak a bit on the envelopes to get the patches meet somewhere on the halfway. Try adjusting the release and attack of one of patches to fit the release and attack of the first patch)
When recording you'll have to ARM both tracks so that the same midi data is recorded to both tracks. Now you go into the first track and erase/remove every second note. When finished you go do the same with the other track, except now you remove every first note. This will give you a, well, acceptable result, but if you are serious about doing orchestral music I recommend that at one point you upgrade to a newer library, or Kontakt 3. Plus, to work like this, doing compromises could be demotivating and not very inspiring. Working like this, the way I described above, belongs to the days of hardware samplers. You get used to work this way if you don't know of anything else, but once you start using more advanced samplers and samplesets you don't bother go back there, thats for sure.
But, don't get me wrong. Miroslav Philharmonik is a very good orchestral tool. I use it all the time! However, I stay away from the staccato patches, only using the lush sounding sustain patches instead. IMO those are what Miroslav's samples are really about.

I've heard some people creating very good 3-way RR patches with Miroslav Philharmonik using a resampling tool called Redmatica and then importing the edited patches into Kontakt, which is a very advanced sampler supporting round robin programming. I think what this person did was to create subtile tuning and coloristic variations to the original patch which gave the illusion of a 3-way up-and-down stroke. I wish there was some way I could use Miroslav Philharmonik's samples with Kontakt, but I guess its not very legal taking into account that this used to be a dongle-protected library when first released.

A third option for you is to use the resampling tool in the Philharmonik player to try and make a decent RR-patch. You'll have to work in the same way as described above only you can try and make a patch sounding more like the original when using resampling instead of trying to find a similar sounding patch.

[idragosani]

Thanks for the great reply! I managed to get closer to the effect I wanted with some envelope editing via Midi CC (boy, using a Wacom tablet makes it even easier!) The instructor for the course said, regarding Kontakt, to use the repeating samples with judicious use because they don't sound all that great. One thing I was going to try was to use two separate tracks and use slightly different samples (like the parent staccato versus the staccato THT), and maybe even slightly detune one, along with editing the attacks via Midi CC a little bit. It will just take some experimentation.

[DarkStar]

When recording you'll have to ARM both tracks so that the same midi data is recorded to both tracks. Now you go into the first track and erase/remove every second note. When finished you go do the same with the other track, except now you remove every first note. This will give you a, well, acceptable result, but if you are serious about doing orchestral music I recommend that at one point you upgrade to a newer library, or Kontakt 3. Plus, to work like this, doing compromises could be demotivating and not very inspiring.

If you were using a host such as Reaper then it would be fairly straight-forward to write a JS script which would receive your MIDI from a single track, and change the channel on every other note - saving you a lot a hassle.

You would add the JS MIDI script and Miroslav to your track, and off you go.

[idragosani]

Hey that's a great idea... I do use Reaper for a lot of my studio work, although for this class I am using Overture, which has pretty good MIDI editing capabilities. It doesn't have a scripting interface, although it would be cool if it did.