custom rules help.

[derAbgang]

[ I posted to a different topic before I realized there was a sticky topic already for this ...]

I've been reading the Shared Rules topics and poking around quite a bit but I'm still missing the big picture when it comes to customizing rules.

I basically want to have EWQL "Play" house orchestra sections, not single instruments. I want to re-use my Play templates both in Notion3 and inside Sonar. I've read the manual section 9.10 and have added a multichannel track and assigned instrument changes to other basic staves etc. But what about articulations?

The default, from what I gather, uses channel changes to change articulation. Play is loaded up with 16 sets of samples and rules are defined to change channel appropriately. But in my scenario, channel changes are "instrument" changes.

Is there a white-paper or decent README stepping through the process of assigning articulations to, say, key-switches. Maybe there is a dialog box that I missed.

Any help would be appreciated.

David

[derAbgang]

I found this: http://www.notionmusic.com/support/down ... uments.zip

Seems to be what I was after ...

[dgriffee]

There are two different approaches, both of which may be seen in the EWQL rules file that is provided in the standard Notion installation. One method uses EWQL's big "multi" patches and channel switching, but that was such a memory hog that users complained they were unable to load a whole orchestra. The folks at NotionMusic then added what they called "Lite" preset rules which use the "master keyswitching" versions of the EWQL instruments, and this works with far less memory consumption such that you can run a whole orchestra with Notion in a single machine. I think the latter is more like what you want to try to do, so suggest you peruse the EWQL rules file but just examine the "Lite" versions of each instrument's rules (which are clearly marked by "Lite" comments).

Also, if you go with the approach of using midi channels to identify instruments in your rules instead of instrument id numbers, it then becomes fairly easy to create your own rules files for ANY other EWQL keyswitching instruments besides the instruments that NotionMusic provided presets for.

Hope this helps, and when you get something working please do post your results.

[derAbgang]

Thanks for the response. As it turns out, what I wanted to do is already done in the EWSO full orchestra templates--5 multi instruments with KS patches for each section of the orchestra (harp being in percussion which I don't really understand).

At any rate, the idea is slick but in practice, using multis like this is problematic for smooth export of midi and re-import into a sequencer. Each multi instrument is one track on export. While this is fine with regard to the midi standard (mixing channels on tracks) it is cumbersome to have to split the channels into tracks inside a sequencer.

Also, mixing is impossible using these multis with notion3 mixer because you only have access to the entire instance of Play, and not the individual instruments. So the word cumbersome comes to mind again as mixing needs to be done across Play instances and then busses can be mixed.

One other thing I noticed which is also problematic is the way the rules for key switching are executed. It has been mentioned here before that there are a tremendous amount of redundant key switches that are fired off. Not only that, but it appears there is no NOTE-OFF for the key switch note either. Regarding redundancy, it seems that if a note is under a slur, the base KS note and the slur KS note are triggered simultaneously.

... at this time, for me it is either work solely in notion3 with mix limitations or work solely in sonar without notation capabilities -- Someday I would like to use ONE program and to be honest, I thought notion3 would have been that program.