Is it possible to change articulations with notation program

[Ben Johnson]

Such as Finale or Sibelius?

I feel so........dirty, composing on a piano roll. [:(]

[DaveTubaKing]

Yes

But there's a lot to it.

What are you trying to achieve and what is your set up?

[Ben Johnson]

I'm using Gigastudio 3 and the free VSL samples that came with it. I'll be buying the Opus bundle soon hopefully, and I'd like to use notation rather than the clumsy piano roll. Although in the Finale demo, I haven't yet found a way to place keyswitch notes discretely, that is, place them in midi but not have them cluttering up the score.

[cerupcat]

What version of Finale will you be using? I just received finale 2007 and (I can't confirm this yet) but in the "Human Playback Preferences" under "Instrument Techniques and Effects" it looks like you can create your own keyswitches. For example on a slur, you can tell it to keyswitch to whatever legato keyswitch there is. I haven't worked this out yet and I don't recall if all the keyswitches are the same for all opus 2 instruments. Luckily it looks like you can set up two keyswitches per technique and this will allowing to set a low keyswitch (for high pitched instruments) and a higher keyswitch (for low instruments). This way you can add an articulation into the score like nomral and theoretically finale should playback with the keyswitches defined. This way you actually don't have to edit at all since Finale's midi tool is a little lacking.

In the preferences you'll also find that you can limit you defined keyswitches and other midi data to certain instruments. For example if one keyswitch only works on Strings, you can limit it to only work on String staves. So basically, once you map all the keyswitches into the preferences they will be saved and you won't need anymore editing after this.

This may sound a bit confusing, but if you can get into Human Playback Preferences and take a look, Finale did a good job at organizing everything pretty well.

I'll be checking this out more in the next few days. If anyone else has more info on this, i'd be interested also. I hope this helps some.