Trombone slide

[Rick Averill]

I am trying to make a MIDI trombone voice slide up a perfect fourth. The pitch bend only goes a major second. I can't figure out how to make portamento work. Can any of you kind folks point me in the right direction with this?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Most statins will allow a range for pitch bend. Two steps is usually the default but you might look at your VI/synth/whatever to program the range for pitch bend.

[Rick Averill]

Thanks for your reply. I’ve searched my Garritan manual and can’t find the way to do this. I will keep looking, though. If anyone on the board here is a Garritan user, perhaps they could help me.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Hey Rick, I have GPO and you can set pitch bend.

https://usermanuals.garritan.com/ARIAPl ... tch%20bend

You click on the slot with the instrument (the menu item DEF (define pitch bend). Set and slide your heart away.

[Rick Averill]

Thanks so much. It never occurred to me to set the pitch bend range in the Aria player. That was exactly the information I needed.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Thanks so much. It never occurred to me to set the pitch bend range in the Aria player. That was exactly the information I needed.

I know. lol Happy to help.

[bkshepard]

On a practical note (pun intended), the maximum a trombone can slide is an augmented-fourth (7th position to 1st position). Depending on your starting note (slide position), a major 2nd might be all the room there is for the slide.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Party pooper! lol

[mhschmieder]

Yep, I was about to add that technical limitation of the actual instrument.

I have Garritan stuff but never use it so didn't get too familiar with its pitch bend ranges and portamento handling. I use Sample Modeling's Trombone, and the user manual is excellent in describing the preferred approaches to achieving different intervals; I think Vienna Symphonic Library also carefully documents the extent of portamento vs. glissando vs. other articulation categories.

I hope you get good results from GPO with the revised pitch bend range. Sample Modeling takes a unique approach and it's a bit cumbersome to achieve; I pretty much have to manually edit after-the-fact, analyze the ratios of note velocity, dynamics, and other factors, and then figure out the length of the "special key" and its velocity, to achieve realistic portamento/slide.

[Rick Averill]

Once MIDI Life Crisis pointed me in the right direction, I had no problem getting the sound I wanted.

I once had a very good trombonist playing on a chart I had written and he told me that a gliss I had written didn’t lay within the slide, but that he could fake it. He did and it sounded perfect.

[bkshepard]

Yeah, players have developed all kinds of tricks to make up for composer/orchestrator mistakes. I'm lookin' at you Béla Bartók!