Extended notes for Oboe, English Horn

[Tomas E]

I want a long note at the end of a piece. The problem is that my Oboe and English Horn finish their notes a couple of beats too early. How do you usually solve this? I guess one could simulate choir breathing for those instruments adding an extra track with a note that fades in and the other one fading out. Is it maybe common practise in live situations to use choir breathing with two instrumentalists supporting each other?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I want a long note at the end of a piece. The problem is that my Oboe and English Horn finish their notes a couple of beats too early. How do you usually solve this?

Have you paid them?

OK, seriously, what instruments are you using? Obviously the envelope is cut short.

[Tomas E]

Haha!

Siedllaczek's Advanced Orchestra. The Oboe samples are about 7 seconds unlooped, guess I could loop them but that takes some time to do. How long a note is playable for a normal human being? That is if an oboeist is concidered as such.

[FMiguelez]

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It depends on the dynamic level, but they can usually hold notes longer than flutes, for instance. So, if I understand you correctly, your sample is 2 seconds short. Hmmmm....
If you don't have any other patches, I suppose you'll have to either, edit the sample, or edit the recorded audio with some kind of cross fade?

If you do the latter, I'd advise you to leave the "release" sound intact, so you should edit somewhere in the middle. Just make sure your vibrato (or non vibrato) matches nicely.

Or, you could blend 2 different patches to make the note longer. You could start with one non-vib patch and cross-fade it into vibrato. This could also be done in the MIDI stage with careful volume automation to emulate a cross fade. Unless it's a solo passage, I'm sure it will be unnoticed if you do a decent editing job.

[Tomas E]

Ok, so about 9 seconds is what they can handle.

Now that the piece is almost finished it could be fun trying to fix this and other "short" patches. As you say there's a lot of work involved and one has to be patient.

[FMiguelez]

Ok, so about 9 seconds is what they can handle.

Depending, of course, on the dynamic level, and the player. It could be more than that (for human players, I mean).

Now that the piece is almost finished it could be fun trying to fix this and other "short" patches. As you say there's a lot of work involved and one has to be patient.

What sample library are you using? Just curious.

With my sample library, I always have to deal with something similar. The crescendo and decrescendo patches are fixed in therms of how many seconds they last. It is very rare that by chance the crescendo lenght will match to start where I want and finish where I want, so I always have to do some kind of editing (crossfading) between a sustained patch and a crescendo (when the crescendo is too short), or sometimes I have to start the crescendo BEFORE the place where I want it, automate the volume to 0, and just do a crossfade where at the point where I want it to start.
It's very tedious, though. But I think my new library handles this much easier and faster... I just have to finish installing it and getting a new huge PC to hold them, among a million other things.

[Tomas E]

Ok, so about 9 seconds is what they can handle.

Depending, of course, on the dynamic level, and the player. It could be more than that (for human players, I mean).

Now that the piece is almost finished it could be fun trying to fix this and other "short" patches. As you say there's a lot of work involved and one has to be patient.

What sample library are you using? Just curious.

Peter Siedlaczek's Advanced Orchestra, besides some of the ones that come with Kontakt. The Piccolo in the Siedlaczek library for instance doesn't contain any sustained notes. Really irritating to find out when I had paid about $240 for the Woodwinds CD (in todays exchange rate). I've included the K2 Piccolo in the Siedlaczek Piccolo bank so nowadays I'm fairly happy with that.