articulation maps and Spitfire Symphonic Strings: possible to go from KS to UACC KS?

[dbikel]

Hi, fellow DP11 users!

I have only just recently upgraded my main music Mac to DP11 (and Big Sur), primarily so I could take advantage of Articulation Maps. In particular, I have a symphonic score using Spitfire instruments (all via Kontakt Player) using the vanilla keyswitch (KS) mechanism for things like "a - Violins 1". After building my own articulation map, I hit "Remap" and it beautifully "absorbed" all the keyswitch MIDI events and assigned all the notes articulations. Fantastic!

However, I'd like to be able to convert from using the KS mechanism to Spitfire's much more flexible UACC KS mechanism (that is used by, e.g., Babylonwaves' Art Conductor). Unlike the regular KS mechanism, where keyswitches are not consistently assigned between instruments,[1] Spitfire *did* see fit to assign things (mostly) consistently in the UACC KS world. So, if I could somehow switch from a KS-based keymap to a UACC KS-based one, then it'd be possible to go from using the simple "a - Violins 1" instrument to a multi that includes "a - Violins 1 - Core techniques" and "a - Violins 1 - Extended techniques" and have everything just work.

Does anyone know if this is even possible? What I really want/need is a kind of "Articulation meta-Map", so that when moving from a Spitfire KS map to a Spitfire UACC KS map the various articulations, like "Spiccato", stay the same, even if their Output triggers are different.

I'm hoping against hope there might be a reasonable way to do this. Thanks in advance!

[1] It is supremely silly to me that Spitfire assigns Spiccato to D-2 in all the basic versions of Symphonic Strings' instruments, but assigns G#-2 to spiccato for the "core techniques" versions of those same instruments.

[dbikel]

Sort of answering my own question, I discovered by experimenting that when you change articulation maps, DP somehow manages to re-map the articulations to be the right ones in the new map.

Case in point: I built my own "native" KS-based map for Spitfire. For the basic "a Violins.nki" instrument, e.g., this means the keyswitch Ab-2 maps to a minor 2nd trill, which I've named, aptly, "Trill (minor 2nd)". When I click on one of the Babylonwaves maps (happens to be "SFSS Violins 1 CB", where "CB" == "combined", meaning all articulations in the "core" and "decorative" Advanced instruments), DP seems to know to keep all notes that had my "Trill (minor 2nd)" articulation attached to a Ab-2 remote and Ab-2 keyswitch should now be using Babylonwaves' mapping named "Trill HT" (where "HT" must mean "half-tone") which uses the UACC KS output of C-2 at velocity 70.

How does this happen? Here are some observations and hypotheses:

• It has nothing to do with the order of articulations in the map.
• Does DP do some kind of fuzzy string matching to (try to) line up articulations from Map A to those in Map B?
• Is there something built-in for various libraries like Spitfire? This is doubtful, given how much work it'd be to maintain libraries.
• Is there something that DP can query via an API call to the virtual instrument? This is possible, although I noticed that when you hit the "Sync to VI" button for Spitfire Symphonic instruments, you get a dialog saying "The current track's assigned Virtual Instrument does not support Articulation Map syncing."

If anyone actually knows the answer, I'd be very interested to know. I may even bug MOTU's support line to see if I can find out from the horse's mouth, as it were.

[dbikel]

[FULLY ANSWERED]

It seems I just needed to RTFM. From page 334 of the DP 11 manual:

Reassigning notes to a different articulation map
When an articulation is first applied to a note, the note remembers the symbol, not the articulation’s remote trigger or output settings. This means that if you change the Articulation map for the track, notes retain their symbols and remap to the corresponding articulation with that same symbol (in the new map), so that you don’t have to do so manually for each articulation symbol. For example, staccato remains staccato — but the Articulation behavior for staccato could be completely different in the new map. Conversely, if you change the symbols in a map, notes with those symbols will lose their associated Articulations.

So as long as different articulation maps use distinctive symbols for each articulation, this will work. It will fail, e.g., if you assign the "tr" symbol to both minor 2nd and major 2nd trills, and you have notes with the major 2nd trill and then change to a new Articulation Map. In the new map, I'm guessing those notes will be assigned to the first articulation with the symbol "tr", which will typically be minor 2nd and not major 2nd.

It would be great if the manual spelled out exactly what happens in the rather common case that two mappings use the exact same symbol.