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piano damper and half-damper with repedalling

Share Custom Rules for NOTION3 and NOTIONSLE

piano damper and half-damper with repedalling

Postby dgriffee » Sat Aug 20, 2011 12:52 pm

this one may be more or less useful depending upon which library(s) of piano instrument(s) you happen to be fortunate to own. It requires pasting an additional snippet into your expressionlist file, so I suppose it is only really for folks bold enough to venture into undocumented "hacks". That being said, I have tested it fairly carefully and it did not break anything in my notion installation, but make a backup just in case and try this at your own risk.

If you have EWQL Piano , this will give you true "repedaling" which that instrument can not do in live perfoemance (but thanks to notion's precision in pre/post note triggers it is possible only for us notion users!)

If you have Synthogy Ivory, this will give you complete control over their very cool partial-damper effect, which in a live performance is extremely difficult to get it to work well but (again thanks to notion's precision of control) is very easy to program just the right values to make it work beautifully. I love this sound "half-damper" sound, it sings and sustains without getting cluttered or mushy.

For other instruments, you might like to use a variant of this trick to get control of true sustain pedal action via cc-64 if that has special functionality on your libs (instead of just holding the notes durations "on" as notion's default pedal markings do).

Here's how these custom rules work...
First I defined the following expressions with the shorcuts and markers shown:
'fped for full-damper-pedal (cc-64=127) ^__
'hped for "half-damper-pedal" (cc-64=104) ^---
'xped for damper-pedal fully-released (cc-64=0) __^

Then I defined two single-note articulations for repedaling:
(This means lifting the pedal up only on one note and pressing it back down again immediately)
'rped for normal repedaling __^__ (fully up - all prior notes stop completely)
'qped for quasi-repedaling --^-- (partially up - slight ringing of harmonic resonance continues)

Then I added the rules (see attached snippet) that use those techniques/articulations on the channel that controls my piano instruments (I use both EWQL Piano and Synthogy Ivory layered together and retuned slightly so they sound like one massively resonant piano.)

Both kinds of repedaling will operate at whichever level (half or full) is currently in effect from a prior marking. The quasi repedaling effect is particularly pretty, alowing just enough of a hint of resonance to continue ringing from prior notes to be noticeable but without becoming cluttered.

...don't know if this will be directly applicable for many folks, but perhapse some folks will find useful bits to extract from this example to make their own custom expression/rules

P.S. ...improved handling of pedal release-timing in updated attached files
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Re: piano damper and half-damper with repedalling

Postby dbrunner01 » Wed Oct 24, 2012 6:47 am

This works perfectly, thank you!
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Re: piano damper and half-damper with repedalling

Postby Surfwhammy » Sat Nov 03, 2012 3:27 pm

This is vastly intriguing, even though at present I do not know enough about MIDI and NOTION 4 custom rules to understand it, hence I am focusing primarily on what all this stuff does, which I think maps to being able to control specific things with intricate pedal actions . . .

More specifically, the description of the what this makes possible looks to map nicely to some of the things that need to be done to make the Lap Steel Guitar (Orange Tree Samples) for Kontakt 5 (Native Instruments) do Country Western style steel guitar in the style made popular by Don Helms in his legendary work on Hank Williams' songs . . .

Don Helms with "Goliath" (a Gibson Console Steel Guitar) -- YouTube music video

"Cold Cold Heart" (Hank Williams) -- YouTube music video

"Honky Tonkin'" (Hank Williams) -- YouTube music video

If you listen to the second sample "Gray Patchwork" at the Orange Tree Samples website page for its Lap Pedal Steel, you can get a sense of the potential for doing this style of Country Western steel guitar . . .

Lap Steel Guitar (Orange Tree Samples)

The problem is that the slides and bends are done with the pitch wheel based on a combination of (a) pre and post pitch wheel motions and (b) various option settings for the way the VSTi virtual instruments responds to pitch wheel actions, as well as such things as interval distance, key snapping, and so forth, where for example you can define the number of half-steps for slides ("Interval distance") and the key to which notes "snap", which is what makes this Lap Steel Guitar VSTi virtual instrument so intriguing, along with the fact that as best as I have been able to determine it is the only steel guitar VSTi virtual instrument currently available on this planet which actually does all this stuff . . .

With a bit of practice and a MIDI keyboard, a skilled pianist certainly could operate the Lap Steel Guitar VSTi virtual instrument in real-time, which is great but is not what I need to do . . .

Instead, I need to be able to specify all the various pitch wheel and volume pedal actions via a combination of music notation and MIDI instructions, as well perhaps as custom Kontakt 5 scripts, and in some instances this needs to be done in different ways for individual strings (which I can do by putting each Lap Steel Guitar string on a separate staff, if necessary) . . .

So, I am encouraged by this set of techniques, and once MIDI and the new enhancements to NOTION 4 for custom rules make sense, this might map to being able to do realistic Country Western steel guitar under control of NOTION 4, the Orange Tree Samples VSTi Lap Steel Guitar, and Kontakt 5, which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous! :)

P. S. Without the ability to do detailed controlling of the pitch wheel and volume pedal, it is not very practical to do this in NOTION 4, and I have a console steel guitar, which I can learn if I work on it for a while, but I prefer to be able to do it NOTION 4, since it will be faster, easier, and more precise . . .
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