Does anyone have problems getting consistent playback with Session Guitarist/Strummed Acoustic?

jimchik · 2023-02-18T16:26:10+00:00

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I’ve been scratching my head for too many hours trying to figure out how to get consistent playback or to even get the chords to change where I want them to consistently.

DP 11.21/Kontakt 6.7.1/MBP 10.15.7 (Catalina)

When I’m playing back a MIDI passage, some measures play back correctly, some don’t. I’ve tried both quantizing and shifting note start times a bit earlier. I’ve played with the note releases and the release settings in the instrument… Honestly, I feel like I’ve tried everything at least 5 times, but with no consistent results.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

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Accepted answers

DunedinDragon

I use a lot of the different session guitarist libraries and I've never had a problem other than initially getting used to the triggering time which is pretty much the same as you would have in switching between chords on an actual guitar. The other thing is how to position the articulation or pattern change MIDI notes so it affects the appropriate chord/pattern at the right time. It's not hard, it just needs to be precise. It's easiest to start a chord slightly ahead of the measure and put the change note on the measure so the change note affects the right chord. If you do change patterns over the course of the song you have to remember there's only one pattern in use at a time. If you have a pattern set later in the track and then reposition the playback to a section that's earlier, you'll still have the same pattern set from the previous section. Again the fix for this is to apply the pattern note across the entire span of where that pattern will be played.

All comments

jimchik

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/54526#Comment_54526

Hey Uwe, thanks again for the hopeful feedback on this instrument. With yours and Dragon's, I'm encouraged to keep plugging away at it.

Uwe303

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/54532#Comment_54532

not really, you can only shorten the phrases and chain them together

DunedinDragon

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/54532#Comment_54532

If you look just above your last post you'll see a screenshot of the pattern maker. That's the tool they give you to create or modify patterns. I personally haven't played with it that much but it seems fairly thorough.

Uwe303

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/54632#Comment_54632

It's not a pattern maker, you can edit the existing ones.

Jojo123

@jimchik you have to have the melody instruments for that. The pattern based ones don't allow for that. However there really is more to these instruments than meets the eye and there are things you can do as work arounds.

@Uwe303 Yes absolutely, it is a limitation not to have an option to have the "stop immediatley" feature for when you do want that. I spent some more time with the guitars. Don't know what you guys have, but just for clarity, I have 4 of them in K13 UCE. . Strummed Accoustic, Strummed Accoustic2, Picked Accoustic and Electric Sunburst delux.

Strummed Accoustic is the only one you can choose to stop instantly via that panel of options. The best the others can do 1/8th. Note: that is when Picked Accoustic and ESBde are using their pattern modes. Of course the melody mode doesn't apply here. If you use the keyswitch to stop immediately its limited in that you are stuck with it sounding the last note you pressed for your chord sequence.

I went and tried to replicate what you said about the auto chords allowing you to stop immediately. I wasn't able to achieve this on those other 3 instruments at all. If I set strummed Accoustic to stop at 1/8 then activated auto chords it didn't stop immediately. There is a case to be made as I think you already said, it depends when actual notes are playing so I made sure I chose a preset that was reasonably busy when I did a key off.

As you've mentioned, its one of my favourite tricks to shorten the phrases AND double them - especially great for variation on an otherwise slow song for incidentals and I do this a lot. I think this one method goes a long way to improve the realism.

What I'd like to see improved is 1/ a finer stop time (1/16th) as well as stop immediately, and 2/ some of the patterns wont play below a certain tempo. I find that pretty limiting. Theres a bit of inconsistency too if I double the project tempo and 1/2 the speed in the pattern. In one case I was able to achieve a lower tempo by just leaaving the pattern tempo at 1.1 and slow the project tempo right down.

I forgot to mention theres one little glitch that happens from time to time. When I stop the transport, depending when I do that, a guitar pattern can just keep playing infinitely until I start the transport again! lol, I use it as an opportunity to freewheel and play other stuff with it. Sometimes I actually find it quite inspiring as weird as that may sound.

Uwe303

Yes you are right, every instrument is different too on top of all that

jimchik

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/54654#Comment_54654

Thank you, Jo-Jo for these insights. I’ll need to go back to it later today (sometime this afternoon) to further delve into things. Especially where the Sunburst is concerned (I think I tried that out like one time before giving up).

More later 🎶🎶

jimchik

Ok… loaded up a clean sequence. Loaded in Strummed Acoustic (Passengers). Playing live, it was great (1/4=120). Changing patterns mid phrase was all seamless. The power button was off (whatever that does), as was the Auto Chords option.

I have to digress here… nowhere could I find documentation for the library. But someone in this thread made a reference to it, if I remember correctly.

Ok, I recorded a pass, just playing along. Power switch on (is this related to Auto Chords?). Recorded and played back with no issue at all. Next, same MIDI track, Auto Chords on (Bbmin… heh) and hit play. Again, no problems whatsoever… except that it basically played in Db, logical since I didn’t change the MIDI data at all.

but the main point is that it all worked fine… as if the gajillion hours spent screwing around with it were wasted. Let alone my and all of yours collective time in this thread…

Uwe303

No problem, we are here in the forum for that purpose, even if it takes longer sometimes. And yes the power button enables auto chords, so you only have to press one white key and the black keys somehow change the notes/Chords.

Squeezebox

I have some multiple problems with NI session guitars paterns. I am using electric vintage patern mode for this example, but the proble is on all my NI Session guitars I am using Ableton Live DAW and Launchkey MIDI contollers.

I recorded into an 8 bar MIDI clip. I changed the launch switch keys 4 times. That is 2 bars for each pattern.

Problem # 1; when I stop the recording and start up again from the very beginning, the patterns start playing where I stopped the playback and not from the first session guitar pattern in the clip. So I reset my DAW to start up from the beginning of the 8 bar clip, and it does, but the session guitar patterns starts up from the key switch that was playinng when I stopped playback.

Problem # 2; When I add a second MIDI clip into the same track to start a chorus part or bridge part and record a differnt set of patterns, the original verse patterns I had already recorded (see problem # 1) All those MIDI clips play the patterns I recorded into the new clips.

Is anyone else having this problem(s)? and has anyone found a fix?

Thank you

Gee_Flat

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/59071#Comment_59071

So this link I gave from the 'best answer' in this thread didn't cover your first problem?

"If you do change patterns over the course of the song you have to remember there's only one pattern in use at a time. If you have a pattern set later in the track and then reposition the playback to a section that's earlier, you'll still have the same pattern set from the previous section. Again the fix for this is to apply the pattern note across the entire span of where that pattern will be played" @DunedinDragon

My guess is when you go back to start, the keyswitch is placed slightly before the start of the bar, and therefore plays the last active pattern/keyswitch.

Also, 'VST Expressions' work great for this because they assure the articulation/keyswitch is the one that is active no matter where you place the play head.

jimchik

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/59084#Comment_59084

My first thought was also about tracking the key switches, but I assumed he had looked into that before posting.

Gee_Flat

The question was originally posted here... 😊

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/11476/session-guitar-problems#latest

MGReis

So I'm using 63 Airplay B with the Sunburst Guitar. Chord changes are either halfway or 3/4 of the way through the pattern. I was getting VERY inconsistent playback. Copy paste the same 4 bars 4 times and get different notes in different bars.

Tried Quantizing, shifting slightly early, still inconsistent playback.

Shortened the note length, knowing playback would continue. I've finally been able to get consistent playback, as expected. Hope this helps. (Start times are still quantized to Start of Measure.)

jimchik

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/146040#Comment_146040

yeah, sounds l like my experience... I guess that that's simply what it takes...

Thanks for posting.

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