Smoother passages

[Audun Jemtland]

Hey! I just bought EWQLSO silver bundle to make a song for the competition they're doing.

But could you help me with the violins? Thery're attacking to hard and it doesn't seem smooth between the passages. I've adjusted the attacks but it sounds false.

Or am I asking to much sinse I only got the lightest version?

Could you give me your "set up" adjustements?

[Vatroslav]

Yes, I think Silver is the number one reason for your problems, but you could try doing a couple of things to lessen the giveaway feel nevertheless ...

Getting strings to sound realistic is a science itself, and this especially goes for the violins. Because of the immense ensemble of players that make the string section, it is very hard or even impossible to expect to get violin leads to sound as realistic as the real thing without spending a great deal of time focusing on every detail and some tricks a lot of MIDI mockupers often use to achieve a believable string sound.

Changing or automating attack times won't do anything other than changing the attack envelopes, not the actual entry of the violins, and I personally never do it as it always sounds very artificial to me. Try to manually edit MIDI notes by extending the start and the end of every note so that they overlap in the cue you have problems with (if your attacks are coming in too hard, you could try only extending the end of every note), experiment with different patches even though you don't have much to work with, and if you're on Kontakt 2, some legato and attack scripts might also help.

Also, even if this is considered art butchering to many composers, you could try doing col violin with some other instruments to mask the abrupt attacks and releases.

But again, upgrading to Gold XP still seems like your best bet for future projects.

[audiochild]

apart from the overlapping mentioned before, try to draw expression curves (I suggest silver doesn't have mod wheel patches) in your midi editor. maybe even spread the violins over two different midi channels. let the two notes overlap, let the volume/expression of the note in the first channel decrease while the volume/expression of the following note in the second channel smoothly raises.

[guy theaker]

Also, try using the 'Pedal keyswitch crossfade' programs for the strings. The mod wheel will allow
you to control the volume, and you get 4 different types of attack, depending on which keyswitch you choose. Trust me, it is possible to get smooth string lines in Silver - experimentation is the key. (You might need to download the Silver update to get these patches - I don't quite remember...)