BOTH! Best Way to Manage Articulations (Virtual Orchestra)

When setting up your virtual orchestra templates, you don’t have to choose between keyswitches or track-per-articulation—you can have both!

Keyswitch tracks are great for quickly writing music while taking advantage of all of our available articulations. But individual articulation tracks let you refine details, especially by layering multiple articulations simultaneously.

This video will walk you through what that setup looks like across your DAW and sample player plug-ins (VSTs, etc.). I show demos using Cubase and Kontakt, but these same techniques will work with many other DAWs that have similar articulation features to Expression Maps (like Articulation Sets in Logic, Sound Variations in Studio One, or Reaticulate in Reaper).


⏱️ Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:37 QUICK DEMO (What both gets you)
03:11 String Runs!
03:39 Keyswitches (The two types)
05:20 HOW TO (Solve the layering problem)
08:16 Three Gotchas
10:36 What Next?


🛠️ HOW TO Steps:

[1] LOAD - multi-timbral sample player w/ 1 articulation per MIDI channel (separated to allow layering)

[2] SET UP - DAW keyswitches w/ MIDI channel routing (sends each articulation to the right MIDI channel)

[3] CREATE - both keyswitch track & individual articulation tracks (absolutely possible to have multiple MIDI tracks that output to the same channels)


🚧 If you get stuck trying this technique out yourself, make sure you check out the 8:16 Three Gotchas chapter (#1 conflicting controllers, #2 extra RAM cost, #3 mono-timbral plug-ins). Or drop me a note below, and I’ll try to help out if I can!