Our good friend Aaron offers the following thoughts on how to program voices for proper articulation on legato vs. stacatto passages, in the context of wind synths and wind controllers. Thanks for the article Aaron!!
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Here's a bit on the note articulation issue. What really happens: When you play notes legato it's quite different from staccato. First of all, there's no attack noise from a bow or your tongue. Secondly, the note never stops sounding. Between the first and second note there is a glide from the first pitch to the second that takes a few milliseconds. There's also a bit of gentle noise from turbulence of the air passing across the opening (or closing) pad in the case of a wind instrument. There's also a short change of tone as the harmonics adjust at a different rate than the fundamental. The real key here is that the sound continues and glides to the new pitch. And our ears hear it even when we don't recognize it. I did some digital recordings a few years back and then analyzed the results. You too can do this and see the phenomenon quite easily with software like CoolEdit or others. Sample based synths approximate legato by switching from one sample pitch to the next without playing the attack portion of the sample. This is an improvement over playing every attack but still not good enough for many of us. There's no glide between notes and more irritating, there's a nasty "click" because the two samples are not connected at a zero crossing. It is possible with some sample based synths to play a "single cycle waveform" and eliminate most of the click but you still don't get the glide and single cycle waveforms are less realistic than real samples. Some synths allow you to set a glide between notes but mosty the setting comes with a glide rate that is interval dependent not fixed time so it's pretty unrealistic, i.e. a glide from C to D takes a few ms but a glide from C up to B takes 11 times longer. I suspect softsynths are doing the same as the hardware ones. Anyone know of changes or improvements in this area? Again, all this happens without additional MIDI CC info; just the sequence of note on/ note off. Perhaps tomorrow I'll write about the MIDI processing routines I wrote to do legato and how some of the Akai synths do it. Meanwhile has anyone else done any useful work in this area or have experience to contribute? Best, Aaron