Chet Singer's Beauchamp Brass: sounds when no note present

glittle

I put this in a comment over on the Beauchamp Brass ensemble page, but maybe here is a better place to ask the question:

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Excellent, so musically playable... a real musical instrument. And the level of craft that appears to have gone into making this... wonderful. I do have a question.

I am using a TEControl breath controller. On the "Breath" page, I have selected "Breath" with the Tonguing Source as "Breath after 20ms" This works great. However, is there a way to get it so that once a note has been let up, it doesn't continue to render sound whenever CC 2 has a non-zero value?

In Cubase, whenever I locate to, forward/rewind to, or otherwise have the location land where there is a track with non-zero CC2 at that point, I get an endless tone generated at whatever the last note played was. The only way to stop it is to locate the play position to where there is no CC2. Changing to "Wind Controller" solves that problem, however, now the tonguing source is key velocity, which is not what I want. I believe Dannenburg allows me to work the way I'd like (ie, I control tonguing with the TEC, but CC2 when no note is currently active generates no sound).

Chet Singer

Hello and thanks for your kind words.

Yeah, that behavior is on purpose. When the Breath Device is set to "Breath controller" it's the controller itself that creates the note-on and note-off events. The only thing the keyboard does is set the pitch.

The purpose is to play as if a real instrument is being played: the sound depends on air pressure alone, regardless of the fingering.

I'll have to think about this. Maybe I can add another Breath Device option.

Chet Singer

Would it help if there was an option to have CC2 treated as CC1 and CC4 are? That is, the value of CC2 would be gated by the note-on and note-off events, with velocity be obtained by the instantaneous value of CC2 at note-on?

glittle

Hey Chet... maybe? I think it would help in my case, at least the gating. I assume you are referring to the Beauchamp engine only paying attention to CC2 if there has been a note-on without a subsequent note-off? It's hard for me to think out the ramifications of that, but at least at first glance, it seems like it would do what I'm thinking.

I really don't know how the second part would work ("...velocity obtained by the value of CC2 at note-on...") Does that mean that as it is now, CC2 determines velocity in some way?

Just in case it matters (I don't yet have a good feel for the nuances of how these are working with velocity vs CC2), I'm pretty sure that Dannenberg behaves "correctly". Or at least, it behaves in a way that seems to feel correct.

Given what you are asking about, does that then take away some of the "tonguing" functionality? In theory, I like that tonguing is sensed, but it's not clear to me how that actually works. It seems that under some breath startup conditions, the attack portion (and perhaps a short bit after) is "different"... is this described in some detail somewhere?