Percussion woes

[sandswillis]

I'm having a very difficult time figuring out why my percussion (snares, timpani, you name it) on rolls sound like machine guns. Do I have the rolls going to fast? Is there a control I should be using to slow it down?

Also, second question: I like the "Drums and Percussion" voicing on Kontakt Gold that I'm using in Sibelius for GPO and would like to use it as my VST instrument in Cubase. Does anyone know how I would get it over to cubase?

[klassical]

If you click on Search this Forum and enter "machine gun" (without the quotes),
you should find a number of posts that will help you with this.

- k

[rbowser-]

Hello, Sandswillis

Doing the search that Klassical suggested will very likely lead you to many explorations of and hopefully good solutions to the "machine gun" issue.

I use Sonar to put together my projects, and don't have experience with notation programs, like the Sibelius you use. But I've tried to get a better understanding of the kind of issues notation users encounter. The last time I tried to help someone with this same problem, they were very frustrated because I wasn't talking in terms that a notation user could understand or use.

Isn't this problem with percussion rolls the most glaring example of what happens when music is guantized perfectly, the way it needs to be to produce good sheet music? It's fairly easy to get natural sounding rolls in a sequencer program like Sonar, because it's a matter of actually playing the roll, with all the natural little human inaccuracies that prevents robotically perfect note entrances. The way GPO has two different samples for each Tympani note helps a great deal also. The velocities can be edited individually as needed.

But am I correct that when you need a Tympani or Snare roll in Sibelius, you just enter a note and the command for a roll, leaving the playing up to the program?

I've certainly noticed these strange sounding robotic ddddddddddd "machine gun" rolls in otherwise nicely done recordings. The "solution" of using two programs for producing recordings--notation, then into a DAW to "mess things up" I know isn't an option for everyone.

So, I don't have answers for you, but questions, and I've done some thinking out loud here. Basically I'm thinking that it seems like an unfortunate handicap that a notation user can't have the option of actually playing at least some passages so that these kind of overly-perfect artifacts aren't an issue.

Randy B.
(rbowser)

[Ed Sharpe]

Also, second question: I like the "Drums and Percussion" voicing on Kontakt Gold that I'm using in Sibelius for GPO and would like to use it as my VST instrument in Cubase. Does anyone know how I would get it over to cubase?

You don't. Kontakt Gold is only usable inside of Sibelius.

That said: You could record the drum passage in Sibelius and then import the wave file into Cubase as an auto track.

Ed