Yesterday I wrote xylophone glissandos in VDL for the first time. The ";gliss up"; dictionary text works as advertised. Two comments/questions:

1. There is no way to control the starting pitch of a gliss, correct? Do the glisses start from a fixed note or a pitch relative to the end note?

2. I wrote a xylo gliss that ended on the E above the staff, with a duration of an eight note. In playback it sounds like the gliss takes about an eight note's duration to play at a tempo of 172. The problem was that the gliss audio [i]started[/i] on the notated eighth note, when in fact a human plays the gliss so that it ends on the notated note. Is there a way to get Sibelius to end the gliss where it is notated, or is that not possible?

To fix the undesired playback I added a hidden gliss on layer 2 one eighth note prior to the displayed note. This works fine, and I imagine I can play around with the needed time prior to the shown note if I have to do this at other tempos. Is this the way to go?

Joe,

You can also use the Live Start Position checkbox (found in the Playback properties toolbox) and enter a negative value in the corresponding box. Click the actual gliss note first, then check this checkbox (see attached file) and input a negative number in the value box to shift the note's starting point backward in time. It will take some experimenting to find the right value but this is pretty handy.

Hope it helps!

Hey, thanks. Is the ";live start position"; value in a particular unit? Maybe milliseconds?

I'm not really sure what the units are. I've never taken the time to try and figure that out. It usually takes me 2 or 3 tries to get it right and then I just leave it!

Seems to be close to ms, but not quite. At a tempo of 160 I fiddled around and came up with a live start position of -150 to move the gliss sound back one eighth note. One eighth note's worth of time at 160 is 187.5 ms, though.