I want to get some feedback on how other people deal with the suspended cymbal roll lengths. All the rolls are sampled at 180 and sometimes they don't line up well at other tempos. I find myself writing in hidden layers with the roll starting on some weird 16th note to make it end in the right place and then muting the visible part. Does anyone have any success using the sustain roll and doind a cresc. underneath?

Obviously no one else cares about this, but I do have another problem.  When I use the updated version of VDL2, with the supended cymbal sustain roll, my MIDI keyboard doesn't read the two sustain keys (C and D). When I open up Kontakt and click those notes on the keyboard at the bottom of the screen I get the playback. So the sounds are loaded into Kontakt but when I am in Sibelius the keyboard doesn't recognize them. Could there be something wrong with my template?

Brad,

Have you downloaded the most recent template?  There was an update that came along with the VDL:2 update.

Hi Brad - sorry for not chiming in to your original question earlier. Pretty buried in reprogramming over here...

Controlling cresc timing of suspended cymbals is a bit of a tricky topic. It's a very good topic though. You could invoke a Volume change (CC 7) on the looped sustained sus cym to make this happen. Unfortunately, this volume change might also affect instruments that are loaded into different channels on the same player. I'm looking into a way to control this with midi expression (CC 11) that should give you more control. Either way, these types of actions are a little more difficult to control in the notation environment, and much more natural in a sequencer. Anyway, this will likely be a topic of hot discussion in future update releases. In the meantime, ";faking it"; is my usual go-to method. Depending on the tempo you're writing in, you have to choose the most appropriate length. Admittedly, It's imperfect more than perfect. These sounds contribute a great deal to the realism you can get from VDL, but aren't necessarily conducive to accurately interfacing with exact notation. So I often do the method you describe (hide the ";playback"; layer), and make a pretty, non-playing notation layer. Just one of the inherent challenges in marrying notation to sampled sounds.

Regarding your second question, drumcorpbc is right. You're probably using an older template that was released before the sustained suspended cymbals were added to VDL2. If that doesn't solve it, let us know.

Thanks Jim and Bill for the replies. The new template was the answer. I have played around with this a bit more and am having decent success using the looped sustain sound. In Sibelius there is plugin for cresc/ decresc playback that lets you choose between CC 7 and CC 11. I've tried the CC 7 and it works pretty well, so that might be an option for users. I only had one instrument on that line though, so it might only be a solution for simpler scores.

[quote author=Buehring link=topic=1575.msg7520#msg7520 date=1172261818]
Thanks Jim and Bill for the replies. The new template was the answer. I have played around with this a bit more and am having decent success using the looped sustain sound. In Sibelius there is plugin for cresc/ decresc playback that lets you choose between CC 7 and CC 11. I've tried the CC 7 and it works pretty well, so that might be an option for users. I only had one instrument on that line though, so it might only be a solution for simpler scores.
[/quote]

That's good news Brad. Glad to hear you were able to make some headway using the Sibelius plugin. If you have other instruments loaded into that same instance of VDL (the one also containing sus cym), I'd be curious to hear if this volume message is affecting other channels.

One other suggestion if you're doing this: After you've completed said crescendo, you might want to type in one more volume setting so the rest of that staff doesn't (maybe) sound too loud in relation to where it started. The syntax for entering a volume setting of (for example) 103 would be:

~C7,103

In case it's of any interest, these CC 7 messages are directly related to the faders in the Sibelius mixer.