It finally feels great!#
I’ve tried to get a sort of orchestral template set up in my DAW for well over a year now, but I’ve always had a lot of trouble getting the all instruments play on time, since all the different articulations have different amount of attack to the samples. I had kept trying to work with 1 track per instrument using expression maps, but this meant I could only set 1 track pre-delay value and that could not work with legato articulation requiring a lot more pre delay than say short notes.
So I finally caved in and set up a template where I had all the articulations I use for the instruments in different tracks, and this meant that the amount of tracks in my project file would increase x5 times which I’d wanted to avoid all this time to keep it more clean.
But after doing a short arrangement of my track The Trek from my submission Long Road Home for the the impressions jam, I found that after identifying the predelay values while working on the arrangement, I could have everything on the grid and it would play correctly I was really surprised (the sampled crescendos of course needed some nudging to find the sweet spot…).
I’m really feeling stupid now, since I could’ve just said fuck it to the large track amount and tried this a long time ago instead of wasting a year trying to make expression maps work for me 😂
But anyway, maybe try to use the articulation per track approach instead of expression maps if you’re having trouble with them.
Here’s the short arrangements of The Trek and the 2 battle tracks from FOX QUEST (Ancient Evil, Encounter) that I arranged from old jam tracks, using the new template.