Late to the party, but I wanted to thank you for pointing this out. Since there is no pitch bend slider available in the Synchron Player (why exactly, anyway?..), I was wondering how/if I could do the transposition trick without doing anything in the sequencer.

Originally Posted by: agitato

As always, I am totally with you on this.

If I can offer any help towards your depression and exasperation at the current state of music, perhaps this will be a refreshing breath of air?....

The "Siren sounds waltz" by the 14 year child prodigy Alma Deuscher (actual music starts around 2:50, unless you want to listen to her intro): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0xMpLXQNvM&list=PLVn-hJ6Izu5NFfAsBx0KiST2mF0AcC3Ue&index=20&t=0s

I think this is pretty remarkable music for a person of that age, or maybe of any age, if we include all the crap music out there. She gives me so much hope for the future.

Anand 

I must disagree here, purely because I think that a well off, incubator-bred wunderkind most certainly isn't what the real world out there needs. These people exist in their own little outside spheres, less affected by how the faceless, soulless mechanisms of corporate culture and algorithm driven reasoning are transfiguring every facet of the everyday world.

Hi Paul!

You mentioned the Chamber Strings being remastered for the Synchron-ized version. Out of interest: what about the Chamber Strings content that is included in the Synchron-ized Special Edition 2? Are these the "original" Chamber Strings samples, or was the remastered material used for these instruments?

Oh, and another somewhat related thing: global mixer preset. When you change the mixer preset of one Dimension Strings/Brass player, it should be changed for all of them.

Awesome Dietz, many thanks! 

Hello VSL team!

I'm under the impression that the Pro version is a bit of a different plugin from the "old" Hybrid Reverb (beyond  added surround functionalities and scalable GUI). Is this correct?

I find the algorithmic reverb of the Pro version much cleaner (actually probably one of the cleanest reverb plugins I ever heard), but also less "rich" sounding. Even with the output level full on, it never gets nearly as dominant or lush as the reverb tail of the old plugin (even setting the old one to -6 or -9dB). Why is that? Another factor seems to be the fact that the old plugin has a density parameter, which the Pro version doesn't.

I'm also not quite sure how to use "Shape" and "PD Shape" in the Pro version and what precisely to be aiming for with these controls. The documentation is a bit brief and cryptic about this - some more practical information would be greatly appreciated.

Regarding the IRs: are those from the Pro version not the same ones that were included in the old version?

Some more info regarding the included IRs and how they interact with the material would be great. Is there additional documentation on the IRs available? There's quite a lot of them and experimenting back and forth can get quite time consuming when you're trying to get something done.

Thanks in advance!

It's very important to always be very dramatic nowadays.

Installing VSL is a fairly simple and nearly fool-proof process in my experience ... 

Originally Posted by: TFIS

Why don't using a controller?

Select all the tracks and move the desired fader.

The slider is not assigned to any controller by default, which means that you first need to assign it to something manually. That's OK  for a library where you only have one IR to begin with, but with Dimension Strings, you'd have to go and literally do it 124 times, one at a time. That's a little tedious ... 

Detache and Portamento for Synchron Strings.

Synchron Brass.

Great to hear, Paul!

Would it be possible to implement a global IR dry/wet control for the Synchron Player? I feel it's required for the Dimension libraries.

Currently, if I wanted to adjust the dry/wet ratio of the Dimension Strings in my project, I'd have to click on 32 different faders by hand and adjust them or map them to a controller. And that only covers the "all players" presets. If I want to adjust the groups, desks and single players accordingly ... well, you get the idea. :)

I would say Teldex as well. Synchron Stage sounds a bit brighter and seemingly also a bit more spacious, but they both have that compact sound that's very versatile.

No, it's a different sample format.

If you want to use some of the articulations of the original Appassionata Strings that are not included in the Synchron-ized version - that's not possible.

If you want the sound/tone of the old Appassionata Strings from the new Synchron-ized ones - turn off the Synchron Stage IR, mixer channels EQ and reverb.

Thank you for this free update, VSL!

 I like the new patches and now with the editing of the existing ones, there should be enough options and variation for everyone to choose from and get the desired results.

 @basses: IMO these were never the problem, so the update pretty much does it as far as the legato issues go. I also don't think that a "cantabile" playing style for basses is particularly high on anyone's list of priorities 

 If I was to pick one more thing as a future improvement, I would suggest re-doing be the sforzato/fortepiano patches. Especially the sforzato in its current state really doesn't sound very musical. I believe the normal "short" articulation was used to crossfade into a long note to create these, and the result sounds quite artificial and jarring. The attack is too short and percussive, so when the sustained portion of the patch comes in, it's very obvious and disconnected and you can tell that you're hearing two sounds which do not belong together at all. A "true sforzato/true fortepiano" note would be much better, or at least a more realistic sounding attack recording crossfading into a long note.

Oh, I missed the latest Synchron Player update, sorry about that. No issues now.

Hi Paul,

I'm on Win10, Synchron Player 1.1.1559. Loading the Synchron Player either as an instrument track in Cubase 10.0.30., or as a standalone inside Vienna Ensemble 6.0.18067. The prepared piano crashes both.

Attempting to load the prepared piano from SE2 crashes the host (Cubase, or VE in standalone). Anyone else having this problem?

I'd like to comment on the new cantabile patches.

Now we're talking! This sounds a lot like what many of us have been missing from the original sustain and legato patches of Synchron Strings. Lush and vibrant chords, flowing, singing melodies. Very happy to see that VSL has not abandoned further development of this library that has great potential, and still believes in the project.

Is it a reasonable hope that cantabile will be available for the other sections as well in the future? That would be great.

I felt the biggest relief, joy and delight when I finally moved away from templates.

Wasn't sure what to expect here, but there are some great sounds in the demos. I hope there will be a more detailed walkthrough video to illustrate what the library consists of and what one can do with it.

In VI Pro, I loved being able to choose different ways of switching between cells along the X and Y axes. It was very easy to set up and worked great. One of the methods I liked using was switching via velocity, where you could define a threshold value so that, for example, velocity 63 and below would trigger one articulation, and anything above 64 would trigger another.

It seems that this is not possible in the Synchron Player, or am I missing something?

You can of course set up a dimension control to velocity, but as there is no way of defining a threshold value, you end up with some random and nonsensical crossover point. The only way to affect this is to fumble around with the control curve, but this is extremely tedious and almost impossible to set up the way you need it.

You can try to literally play around with the curve for hours until you eventually find the exact curvature by accident, but this is of course a ridiculous game of skill. And since the GUI of the control curve is very small and can't be enlarged, it's very hard to visually recognize any change in the curve when fine-tuning it.

Please bring back the old threshold setup from VI Pro.

The Synchronized Appassionata are very different from Synchron Strings.

They compliment each other very well. Many users haven't been very fond of the Synchron Strings long notes, finding the somewhat brittle tone, timid vibrato and barely audible legato transitions sterile and unexciting. Appassionata is very much the opposite, as the name indicates. Layering both libraries can very much lead to more expressiveness, liveliness and a more attractive sound.

Conversely, in the short notes department, Appassionata obviously has the size, but due to the large ensemble size, the staccato and spiccato articulations aren't very defined and don't have the percussive quality of smaller sized bands. When layered with the very crisp, tight and pleasantly textured short notes of Synchron Strings, you get a blend which has both the focus and detail as well as size and power.

You can of course even layer both libraries within the Synchron Player instead of having them in their own instances and on different tracks in your DAW. Then you can also switch your custom instrument from Appassionata, Synchron or a blend of both by simply enabling/muting the corresponding channels and adjusting the volumes in the mixer.

I do layer strings most of the time. If I'm for example layering Appassionata with Solo Strings, I would finish the Appassionata performance, then copy the MIDI events to the Solo and listen back and adjust things like velocity crossfade etc. It's two entirely different sample sets that behave differently, so one shouldn't just copy stuff 1:1 and leave it as is.

I however generally do not re-do humanization, unless something sounds wrong. Even if you use the exact same humanization settings for both libraries you're layering, there's gonna be enough variation either way when using the "in tune random" preset. So I think just leaving it as is and letting it do its thing is OK most of the time.

Originally Posted by: jasensmith

So do you just keep the tunning at about 15 to 20 cents or keep the tunning fader around 15 or 20?

Generally I have the global humanize scaler all the way up, so that it's always doing something. I then adjust the tuning fader depending on the piece I'm working on. I like to keep it around 35 and dial back if it's too much. Sometimes I'll have it below that, but if there's a note where I really want to hear a change, I map the tuning fader to a CC and ramp the value up in the corresponding MIDI lane in Cubase just for that note or passage.

It's true that the "humanization" is already there in some large section recordins - Appassionata is a good example. That's why the short notes are not as snappy, gritty and on point as you would get in smaller section string libraries. The long notes feature an audible chorus-y "spread" effect.

I still like to use a bit of humanization even with those samples, especially the tuning portion of it - simply to have a bit of a subtle difference between long notes of the same pitch within a phrase. Even with multisampling and round robin, this is one situation where samples can sound tiring to the ear and overly artificial.

You obviously don't want to have very different sounding samples on one note and in the same dynamic. The sampling itself needs to be consistent, otherwise your sequencing of phrases ends up a frustratingly unpredictable experience. There are some Kontakt-based libraries of other companies where I'm forced to work around (for example exclude certain notes from round robin) the "bum notes" that are in the sample pool.

VSL is always very consistent and even, so that you can trust that a particular note will always sound the same, no matter how often you play it in succession. But the downside is that if your phrase includes a certain pitch multiple times with a similar duration, it can sound a bit strenuous and "fake" because the same pitch keeps on playing back like an alarm sound. Some slight random humanization in addition to altering the velocity x-fade and expression curves can help offset this a bit.