Last night I wanted to write a BD roll and a tam-tam roll that crescendo and then are dampened or muted at the end of the roll. These are useful, for example, in situations where a marching band or drum corps crescendos towards a climax, but has a moment of silence before the actual climax.

With the suspended cymbal instruments, there are muted roll samples available that are perfect for this sort of thing. There are no samples like that for TT and BD, right?

The best thing I could come up with was to notate sustained rolls, use Sibelius's crescendo/decrescendo plugin to give them the crescendo, and then give one final C7,0 command at the silence so that the sound doesn't ring over when the sampled sustained roll ends (as it normally would, since these rolls are sampled with natural decays at the end). This leaves things sounding a bit lacking, as the actual sound of muting a tam-tam or bass drum is missing from the playback.

Is there a better way to get this to play back realistically in Sibelius. Is there a reason sampled muted tam-tam and bass drum rolls aren't included in VDL?

There are actually dampened tam tam crescendo rolls in the ";Tam Tam 34in Zildjian"; patch. There are also crescendo concert bass rolls (but not ones that dampen on release).

If you're using the BD/TT Combo instrument, you won't have access to the dampened tam tam. Sorry. When that instrument was programmed, it wasn't with the intention of including each sound from both instruments, but more as a utilitarian patch that gave you the basics.

The volume  workaround will approximate the effect for you, but I'd recommend adding the 34in Zildjian tam tam (perhaps using an ossia staff in Sibelius), and have that play along with the cresc. bass roll so you'll get the real thing. If you want the bass to cut off a little early (so you don't hear the drum ringing), you could adjust the ";live start position"; with a negative number, and that may get you pretty darn close to the right sound.

Thanks for the tip about the 34-in tam-tam having dampened roll samples. I was not using the combo instrument, but I typically switch to the 30-inch tam-tam when I need to leave the combo. I thought the 30-inch tam-tam was the one in the combo; is it actually the 34?

I experimented with the dampened tam-tam rolls, but they are all too short. My roll crescendos over 8 beats, beggining at a tempo of 108 and slowing to 83 gradually over all 8 beats. So it's a pretty long roll. With some instruments I can get around this problem by tying a sustained roll into a crescendo roll - but there is no sustained tam-tam roll, so so much for that idea. :) I reverted to what I previously had in place.

As for the bass roll, I wasn't clear in my initial post but I have one player rolling on bass and another on tam-tam, notated on two different staves. One-handed tam-tam rolls are pretty easy, but not concert bass... So I really do want and need a sustained bass roll that goes for all 8 beats and then ceases suddenly, not one that ends early an decays naturally before the notated roll is over.

[quote author=Joe link=topic=4406.msg23078#msg23078 date=1340414956]
... So I really do want and need a sustained bass roll that goes for all 8 beats and then ceases suddenly, not one that ends early an decays naturally before the notated roll is over.
[/quote]

The only thing I can think of is to edit the sound post-Sibelius, as in a DAW. Not sure if that's part of your normal workflow though.

Nope, it's not.

Yeah, I didn't think it was.

The tam tam used in the BD/Tam combo is the 34in Zildjian (if I remember off the top of my head). It's true the muted tam swells are on the shorter side. I think I had Rite of Spring in mind at that point. If you have a lot of other things going on in your score, sometimes it's passable (in my opinion) to have the roll sound start later - since the other stuff would be sort of covering it up and the start of the roll is soft and less descript. You could still notate it the way you want it to appear, but have it start later using the 'live start position' thing in Sibelius. Just a thought since this one may require some creativity.