Hello Tapspace,

Having used your products since 2006, they have helped my writing tremendously for all these years.

However, I have always wondered if there is a way to control the LH RH sounds for pitched percussion instruments. I usually have always been able to find a work-around, but in this case, I really need to have this level of control to make timpani sound the way they need to.

I have tried exploring Sibelius 7 to see if any of the options will let me do this, but I think it's really a Virtual Drumline / Kontakt Player thing rather than the notation program. I've also tried messing around with the soundset, tried making the Timpani a DrumMap instead of a Sound, but the extra notes I made would not be highlighted in KP5. I feel like I've exhausted all options, but I am sure I have heard of a simple way to make this work, I just forget how to do it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Also, I apologize if I'm repeating an already existing topic here. I looked around for quite a while and didn't find anything quite like what I need here.

I'm running on Windows 7, and using Sibelius 7, KP5, and VDL 2.5.5. Thanks for any help!

They are mapped and coded to be alternating.  The individual hand samples aren't available to the end user.

Alright, I guess I will have to continue putting a hidden and silent note in between every two notes I want not to alternate... which is very time-consuming and ugly, especially when I need to edit anything.

I was hoping for perhaps a 3rd party software to edit the code, or some kind of solution. Are there any plans to fix this? Or is it truly this disappointingly cut and dry?

I can't imagine any plans to change that.  It'd be very cumbersome to be able to control individual hands, especially since you'd have to have keyswitches, or text commands to alternate with each hand sharing to same keyboard note.

In all honesty, the hands are close enough to each other that I've never felt the need to want to control the hand.

If I let you hear what I'm working on right now, you'd understand. I've seen past posts about this issue before, and I could have sworn I saw some solution.

Certain velocities in VDL are a lot more uneven hand to hand than others, and what I'm writing plays back like someone is playing on a drum that not only is out of tune hand to hand, but accented pretty badly as well. Basically, I want a nice even ostinato in an odd time, and instead of repeating each bar, it sounds like it's repeating every other bar. It's pretty annoying.

Timpani is a very delicate, sensitive instrument. I think perhaps it sounds fine for the keyboard instruments, but there are few enough notes in the range of timpani that I think allowing to control the hand would be worth it. Although I might be the only one wanting it now, with a marketed demonstration in the difference in sound with a similar passage to what I'm working on, it would make for a strong update.

There isn't an easy way to adjust this from the Sibelius realm - your workaround does sound cumbersome and clumsy.

There are certainly some imperfections in the hand-to-hand performance depending on the musical situation. In most cases, this hasn't been a very common complaint, so it's not high on the list of things needing to be updated, I'm afraid.

If you send me a PM, I'll see what I can do to help you out in this particular situation. It wouldn't be difficult to build a customized 'manual' instrument for hand-to-hand control. It'd be mapped with RH and LH strokes a few octaves apart, and may quickly result in the also-undesireable machine gunning.

Since timpanists are taught to always play with a single hand when possible, it would be nice to have a VDL instrument that can play this technique back realistically (as so many of the other VDL instruments can). I would be happy to have AutoRL and MANUAL versions of the the timpani instrument, and I would be more than happy to start writing timpani parts like I do battery parts, notating where I want different hands.

I would imagine that using VDL in a live playback situation, it would be even more important to have MANUAL timpani control...