Cymbal A with Sibelius

[byronhawkins]

Hi, I'm not able to access all the roll variations in the Cymbal A patch when playing via Sibelius. If I tweak the Cymbals A-D instrument to play sound ID "unpitched.metal.cymbals.roll.crescendo.fast.*" (where * represents several dozen options that I tried manually), it always plays the 2-second strong crescendo. But I want the 2-second medium crescendo. It is not possible to shift this patch downward by a semitone (i.e., to -1). 

In general, is there a way to disassemble the sound set, such that all the internal sound IDs become readable? That would save me a huge amount of time trying to guess which sound IDs are mapped to which score features (e.g. tremolos, symbols like +, etc). Or please educate me if there is another way to control which note on the patch is triggered by a particular percussion note in the Siblius score. For other instruments we can use the actual pitch, but with unpitched percussion it becomes a guessing game. 

In the past I've just set up a hidden pitched staff and manually hack-mapped the notes onto percussion patches such that VSL is forced to play the note I chose. But this is very time consuming and messy because one must constantly remember to keep the two staves in synch--or else the printed percussion part is total garbage and can be used for nothing. I would much prefer to have Siblius play the actual printed part in such a way that VSL executes the intended patch notes--all without guessing sound IDs.

It seems entirely unfair, that we must guess! Couldn't you at least print out a table of the sound IDs in a vastly large PDF? It may not seem tidy, but at least we will not have to guess! Thanks for your help.

Byron

[andi]

Hello Byron!

The 2-second medium crescendo for Cymbal A is mapped on F6. You can trigger this sample by adding a tremolo sign and the Technique Text commands "fast" AND "crescendo".

Please note that not all samples of the Percussion Instrument collection can be triggered with notation symbols and text commands. This would have made the "VE Percussion" sound set grow out of proportions which would slow down Sibelius. If you want to have every mapped percussion sample at your hand with Sibelius, please check out the last chapter of the "VE Percussion sound set" manual for hints on how to trigger Percussion samples with entering the pitch they are mapped to. This manual can be found in your Applications folder under VSL Sibelius Soundsets (Mac) or in your Start menu under All Programs/VSL Sibelius Soundsets (Windows).

All details about the mapping can be found in the Percussion Library manual.
http://www.vsl.co.at/en/MyDownloads/Library_Manuals

A table of Sound IDs can be seen, if you open the sound set file "VE Percussion.xml" with the Sibelius Sound Set Editor and look under "Drum maps". It can be downloaded from the Sibelius website for free. Please understand that the Sound Set Editor or manipulated sound sets can not be supported by us.

Best regards,
Andi

[byronhawkins]

That's great, thanks so much for the guidance. I understand that the Sibelius playback system is very limited, so this is very helpful to know how much of the mapping is automatically supported.

Is there any way to influence the percussion staff's pitch by entering a MIDI commands as a Sibelius text command? Something like "~F6" to tell Sibelius "this note is F6". No worries if they didn't provide any such mechanism, but please let me know if there is a way to do this.

[andi]

You can send note-on and note-off commands for notes as described in the "Optimizing Sibelius Playback" manual, page 21 and in the Sibelius Reference.

If you use a Percussion staff as described in the last chapter of the "VE Percussion sound set" manual, you don't need these commands. You can enter the notes by pitch directly.

Best,
Andi