Articulation ID is now a reality: ARTz•ID by SkiSwitcher

Peter "Ski" Schwartz and SkiSwitcher.com are proud to announce the release of the first articulation-switching system to tap into Logic's native Articulation ID infrastructure: ARTzID for Logic Pro.

ARTzID writes Articulation ID information directly to each note as you play and record. Not only does this ensure perfect playback of your samples from any start point, but when you copy, move or quantize notes, the articulation information moves right along with them. And when you click on notes in the piano roll, score or event list, they instantly sound with the right articulation.

With ARTzID you can switch between (get ready for it) up to 126 articulations per instrument (up to 144 in Vienna Instruments). Supports Keyswitching, UACC (Spitfire), Vienna Instruments, Kontakt Quick Load, Multi-Timbral MIDI patches (16 articulations, naturally), and of course EXS-24.

Don't have patches with anything close to 126 articulations? Build them yourself with ARTzID's suite of specialty scripts. The Multi-Keyswitcher, Vienna Multi-Matrix, and Hybridizer Scripts let you combine patches in various ways to form huge aggregate instruments. And all of the articulations you combine can be recorded on a single track.

Setup for each instrument is entirely menu-based from the Scripter GUIs or from Smart Controls.

Additional ARTzID features include polyphonic articulation switching & polyphonic overdubbing (works with any patch or combination of patches), "sticky" articulation selection, multi-timbral instrument "track creep" reduction, and much more.

Please visit http://www.skiswitcher.com for details, and of course I'll be happy to discuss the system's details here at my favorite place for talking about Logic!

Thanks GP. A video is in the works. I'll post here when it's up.

Yes! A video is worth.... a thousand pictures!

PS: Ski, this new tool you cooked up for Logic looks truly amazing. A game changer for all film composers!!

This is clearly a massively inspiring development Ski … it seems to be a rare tool which truly puts the power of individual expression back in the creator's hands.

What will be really interesting is I suspect one will be able to hear the difference between composers/writers who are able to master your application and reach new heights of expression - and those who for whatever reason - let's not pre-judge - don't seem to get beyond a more wooden kind of expression of sampled string sounds..

Whoever succeeds creatively is really have to going to get to know deeply how your articulation system works - and perhaps we will see fruits from the best creators… the way we saw what the likes of Joe Zawinul ( not that there are that many 'likes' of him ) could do with an Oberheim or an Arp 2000 back in the day..

Thanks David and MS!

I guess it's really all about making the production process more musical, and providing of options to expand the palette of sounds and nuances you can leverage for each instrument. And reduce track count. And play with Smart Controls. And... LOL OK, back to video production.

A game changer for Composers...WHO DON'T USE CUBASE.

Sorry to troll. Recent Cubase convert to Logic for various reasons. But I really miss expression maps.

I got to play with this yesterday, with Peter's help.

What he has achieved with this is remarkable, just brilliant, and if you need more than 16 patches in an instrument, a great choice.

But for me I am sticking with the SkiSwitcher 2 because through no fault of Peter's, it doesn't work in Folder Stacks and they are an important part of my Logic Pro X workflow. Also, 7-10 articulations for an instrument in the libraries I use allow me to compose 95% of what I ever need to compose.

Please forgive my ignorance, but if it needs a keyboard for keyswitches, why not use keyswitches within the sample player itself?

Is this hardware requirement in addition to already having a midi keyboard?

Thanks, I am interested, but confused (My normal state of existenz).

Please forgive my ignorance, but if it needs a keyboard for keyswitches, why not use keyswitches within the sample player itself?

 

Is this hardware requirement in addition to already having a midi keyboard?

 

Thanks, I am interested, but confused (My normal state of existenz).

1. Keyswitches do not chase until t5hey see the keyswitch note, Peter's SkiSwitcher chases the correct articulation instantly anywhere in the project.

2. What hardware requirement? You can use just your main keyboard if you want to.

Thanks for the reply. If you read Peter's blurb, it says that there is a hardware requirement. So, I am just wondering if I need a little midi controller in addition to my regular one.

So, you still have to hit the keyswitch note whilst playing the phrase? Or are they entered post-hoc?

Thanks for the reply. If you read Peter's blurb, it says that there is a hardware requirement. So, I am just wondering if I need a little midi controller in addition to my regular one.

 

So, you still have to hit the keyswitch note whilst playing the phrase? Or are they entered post-hoc?

I believe that he recommends a 2nd little keyboard but that it is not essential. With the original SkiSwitcher 2, you can change the articulation by simply going into the Event List and changing the note(s)' MIDI channel. With the Articulation IDI think it can also be done in a MID editor after the fact, but i will let Peter give you the definitive answer.

Anyway, it is vastly superior to normal keyswitching.

Please forgive my ignorance, but if it needs a keyboard for keyswitches, why not use keyswitches within the sample player itself?

 

Is this hardware requirement in addition to already having a midi keyboard?

I believe it is, yes (until ski can confirm).

With ARTz•ID you use the keyboard to trigger the keyswitches (just like you would regular keyswitches), and ARTz•ID turns the keyswitches into articulation IDs. While keyswitches are independent events that must switch the instrument before the Note On triggers it, the articulation ID is a parameter of the Note On itself, so while regular keyswitches don't chase upon playback (if you start playback between the keyswitch and the Note on, the instrument never receives the keyswitch and therefore plays back the wrong articulation), articulation IDs ensure that all notes play the correct articulation, always, independent of where playback starts.

[EDIT: ARTzID is now compatible with track stacks, and you can also now select articulations using notes on your main controller. Thus, some of the discussion that follows is no longer valid.

Thanks for the reply. If you read Peter's blurb, it says that there is a hardware requirement. So, I am just wondering if I need a little midi controller in addition to my regular one.

Yes. That's it exactly. It can be a mini-keyboard, an iPad running some kind of virtual keyboard, or it can be TouchOSC setup or Lemur. You cannot use the notes on your main controller to change articulations.

So, you still have to hit the keyswitch note whilst playing the phrase? Or are they entered post-hoc?

I see we have a nomenclature problem! So I'll explain...

The keys you play on this keyboard (or other) device do one thing: they write an Articulation ID value to the notes you play on your main keyboard. They don't sent out keyswitch notes, and the notes you play on it don't get recorded.

SkiSwitcher chases the correct articulation instantly anywhere in the project

Neither SkiSwitcher2 nor ARTzID chase anything. Chasing implies that there is a recorded MIDI event (like a keyswitch note) that needs to be detected by Logic in advance of a change in your articulation choice. With ARTzID you're not going to be recording any keyswitch notes, CC#32 messages, program changes or any other kind of "articulation-switching instruction" in the form of a MIDI event. Thus, there's nothing to chase. The notes will end up containing the information about your articulation choice. The articulation choice for a note occurs the instant it plays. There is no chasing.

More after coffee....

But for me I am sticking with the SkiSwitcher 2 because through no fault of Peter's, it doesn't work in Folder Stacks and they are an important part of my Logic Pro X workflow. Also, 7-10 articulations for an instrument in the libraries I use allow me to compose 95% of what I ever need to compose.

So I can't count on you as a customer then, eh Jay?

Track stacks... There's nothing I can do about it because this is how Logic works when you combine two of its own features. Actually, I can do something about this -- I can suggest a workaround: use Hide Groups. Voila.

Here's how I look at this... I've brought hidden feature out of the shadows that adds huge capability to the program that wasn't previously accessible. The fact that Logic is incompatible with its own features simply "is what it is". And for a system designed to make it easier to work with sampled instruments in a hugely fundamental way, I wasn't going to shelve 6 months of intense R&D because the system doesn't work within the confines of one feature. Just like I didn't shelve SkiSwitcher2 because it was incompatible with polyphonic staff styles. Know what I mean?

Thank you, that's very kind of you to say Jay!

To answer the question of "what does the articulation-switching device actually do", I created a short lil' video. It's not my usual quality but it gets the point across.

[EDIT: At the time this video was made it was necessary to use a secondary device to switch articulations. Now you can now select articulations using notes from your main controller too. But the video is still valid in the sense that it shows the net result of what happens when you select articulations using any method (keyboard notes, CC#32 messages, even program change messages) using ARTzID.]

Reviewing the thread... As Jay pointed out, you can indeed go into the event list and manually set notes to various articulation ID values. So if you're doing step-time entry or manual entry of notes as some composers do, you can set the ID value of notes, either individually or in groups, to have the ID's needed to get them to play the sounds you want.

I come from a live performance background, so my natural inclination is to play everything in, including articulation-switching notes (notice I'm trying to avoid the term "keyswitching" ). But on the total opposite end of the spectrum, after I record something I quite routinely change ID's after-the-fact, to improve on realism or add more personality to a phrase.

For example, I have a Hybrid patch for EW violins that contains the basic keyswitching violins patch plus a bunch of extra staccato samples tacked onto it. This gives me a much larger pool of staccato playing styles to choose from than what you get from the keyswitching patch alone. Shorter releases, longer attacks, longer and shorter durations... It's amazing how much more personality you can put into a staccato passage by not always drawing from the same pool of samples.

Thanks for the video. Looks simple enough!

Couple questions -

Is the only way to change the articulation after the fact through the event ID window?

Can you elaborate on the problem using track stacks? On this particular TV show I have all of the instrument tracks organized into Summing Stacks in place of Aux busses. I export stems from the Sum Track. I don't use it for any kind of "mega instruments" or anything like that. Would I run into problems, or would I have to switch to a more traditional Aux based routing scheme?

Sidebar - I absolutely HATE that both options for folders involve some kind of fader being created on the mixer. I often only want folders for visual organization ONLY. I don't need Logic auto-routing stuff for me. Sheesh. But BECAUSE Logic always creates a freaking fader, summing stacks seemed to be the "cleanest" layout to me.

Hi GP,

Changing articulation after-the-fact: yes, currently the only way to do that is via the Event List. I was having a conversation with someone about this today on vi-control, and I came up with an interim solution that provides the equivalent of key commands like those we have for changing the MIDI channel (Event Chanel +1 and -1). I'll consolidate that information here in a separate post.

Regarding the problem with track stacks & folders: without going into too much detail... when a track lives in a stack or folder, a critical link between the articulation-switching device (like the keyboard shown in the video) and the articulation ID system breaks. If you move the track out of the stack or folder, the link is restored. It's very, very odd.

On this particular TV show I have all of the instrument tracks organized into Summing Stacks in place of Aux busses. I export stems from the Sum Track. I don't use it for any kind of "mega instruments" or anything like that. Would I run into problems, or would I have to switch to a more traditional Aux based routing scheme?

Summing stacks provide two main things: a means for reducing eye clutter, and VCA control of levels (the fader that's created when you make a summing stack is a VCA fader). If your tracks lived outside of summing stacks, you could still put them under VCA control very easily. And VCA control is far preferable to traditional Aux routing because if you've got sends on any of your channels for reverb, etc., raising or lowering the level of the VCA adjusts the level of the sends proportionally.

But what about the solo button for printing stems? Solution: if you route your instruments to Auxes to act as subgroups, that's where you'd hit the solo button for the purpose of creating stems. You'd just leave their faders at 0 dB. I don't recall if you'd have to solo your reverbs or other FX as well (I have to be in front of Logic to remember that, and I'm not in the studio at the moment).

Finally, an alternative to creating Auxes would be to use bus channel strips.

I used to hate Logic's auto-creation of Auxes and stuff. I guess I've gotten used to it, but it's not like I don't often have to untangle the knot that Logic makes for me when it auto-creates signal routings. It's definitely a love/hate thing for me.

Sidebar - I absolutely HATE that both options for folders involve some kind of fader being created on the mixer. I often only want folders for visual organization ONLY. I don't need Logic auto-routing stuff for me. Sheesh. But BECAUSE Logic always creates a freaking fader, summing stacks seemed to be the "cleanest" layout to me.

I agree. Summing Stacks should have faders, but not Folder Stacks.

Hi

Changing articulation after-the-fact: yes, currently the only way to do that is via the Event List.

 

You should also be able to change the Art ID in the Piano Roll via a Control Click on a note. Sadly, not in the Score.

CCT

You should also be able to change the Art ID in the Piano Roll via a Control Click on a note. Sadly, not in the Score.

Hey There CCT,

Yes, you can do this, but with only two values to choose from (zero doesn't count) it's hardly useful...

Per a conversation with 'resound' on vi-control...

[EDIT: Please also see CCTmusic's post below]

The best method I've found so far for using key commands to change articulation id is to use the commands shown here:

The Workflow

1) In the main window, have the PR or Score Editor visible, as well as the Event List.

2) Click on an articulation ID value in the Event List

Now you can use those key commands to change the ID of any notes you select in the PR or Score.

To get this action to kick in, it may be necessary to actually change (even temporarily) an ID value of a note in the Event List rather than just click on the value directly. The behavior doesn't seem entirely consistent. But once you get it working you can freely select notes in either editor and adjust the values with those commands.

Hi

You should also be able to change the Art ID in the Piano Roll via a Control Click on a note. Sadly, not in the Score.

 

Hey There CCT,

 

Yes, you can do this, but with only two values to choose from (zero doesn't count) it's hardly useful...

 

]

Thats odd because, with a swift test of your brill new setup. I get as many ArtId's as I have used in the test project

CCT

[this is in my best Cali Valley Girl accent] OMG!! I like so to-------tally don't see anything like that.

And the screenshot I took was from a track that had tons of different articulation changes.

brill

Cheers!

Hi

 

[this is in my best Cali Valley Girl accent] OMG!! I like so to-------tally don't see anything like that.

 

And the screenshot I took was from a track that had tons of different articulation changes.

 

 

Seems like you may need to restart Logic to get them to show up?

Go figure...

CCT

HI

Dunno what to say...

Just did a new test and got

CCT