Apple MainStage — Articulating Strings
Strings are complex sections of the orchestra, and this article provides some options for rapidly and easily switching articulations in your strings in realtime when performing in MainStage.
When performing live it is common when using string patches to have to switch between the various string articulations in real time, while playing the piece. Realistic strings involve the use of many different articulations, and when recording in the studio you would probably have multiple tracks lined up with each of your legato, longs, shorts, pizzicato, etc. However, how do you do this in a live piece where one minute you are playing a fast run and need a staccato patch, and maybe that run ends with a chord? Or perhaps you have a constant run of string notes with some pizzicato notes thrown in the middle.
The other common one is use of tremolo in the middle of an otherwise arco string patch.
There are three techniques I use to achieve this, over and above patch switching and splitting the keyboard, which is obvious so I won’t cover it here.
Option 1 — Key Switching
Probably the most obvious is key switching, and is available in some string patches and not others. This is a simple concept where unused keys are used to change the articulation. Simply press the key corresponding to the next articulation you want to use.
This is now available in the some of the stock libraries with MainStage, and while it is easy to understand it a) requires you to reserve some keys for the switching, b) remember what they were, and c) makes playing two hands a little tricky, though not impossible in most cases.
Option 2 — Velocity Switching
A variant on the above — this uses the velocity of the played note (how hard you strike it) to determine which articulations to use. For instance, you may have legato strings at v < 80, marcato strings from 8 to 110, and maybe pizzicato if you bash the keys to get between 111 and 127 (all MIDI messages have values from 0 to 127).
This can be very effective for a simple situation, but it can be lumpy moving between the articulations, and requires a certain amount of control which may or may not be that easy depending on your playing experience and your keyboard type.
Option 3 — Pedals
This option is really why I wrote this article. In most patches you’re only going to need two or three articulations, so with a combination of different patches, a bit of option 2 for the occasional pizzicato, and option 3, which I’ll go into now, I tend to cover everything I need.
The idea of using a pedal is to have your normal arco string patch as the default, but override this with the pedal, as long as the pedal is held down. For instance, you may have a generic polyphonic string patch loaded, but when you press the pedal this changes to a monophonic legato articulation for a fast running section. Alternatively you may wish to put tremolo strings on the pedal for that little bit of tremolo that’s been inserted in an otherwise non-tremolo string part.
If your chosen string library supports switching then we can use the pedal to drive this switching, but even if it doesn’t this can still be achieved. The stock string library in Mainstage uses velocity triggers (so, option 2) right out of the gate, but then uses an Articulation ID to switch between the different articulations, much like Logic Pro. The patches that support this have a + symbol at the end of the name, for instance “Full Strings+”.
Configuring pedaled articulations
The revamped Sampler plugin (shown above) makes it possible to see which sounds are mapped to what controls, by selecting the Mapping tab at the top. You can then see all the different articulations, and they’re keymapping shown in the main mapping window. All the usual suspects are there, and you can see that within Legato, say, there are three mappings for Forte, Mezzo Forte, and Piano respectively. If you select one of these rows you can see the velocity range shown to the right. For instance, Mezzo Forte is used when the velocity is between 71 and 110. So you can play this standard patch and hear the appropriate sample being used.
In the latest libraries the transition between these different samples is actually pretty good. But how to access those other articulations, such as tremolo or pizzicato using the pedal?
If we bring up the Sampler window for the strings patch by double clicking the Sampler plugin in the channel strip, and selecting the Mapping tab at the top we can see the keys that different articulations are mapped to. In the view window we can see we also have the option to add a visible column in the group list, that of Enable by Articulation. The mapping window is divided into the three tables. The default view is the one initially shown, but what this option does is add more columns to the Group view, which we get to by clicking the G icon in the top right of the mapping window.
If we scroll along a little in this view you can now see a new column heading called Enable by Articulation and this gives us an Articulation ID for each group. A group in this context refers to all the legato patches, f, mf and p, for instance. This entire group is enabled by Articulation ID 1, and is then divided into f, mf and p samples by velocity.
Make sense?
In the old days we would now have to jump through a few hoops to connect our pedal input to change this, but MainStage now has native support for these articulations. Any channel strip can have articulation maps assigned, and the stock sounds all have sensible defaults preconfigured.
Select the channel strip our strings are loaded into, and then navigate to the Layer Editor tab in the inspector. You see a new dropdown called Articulation Set at the bottom of this window. If using Full Strings+, as I am, this should already be populated.
In this dropdown you can select Edit, and now we can assign triggers, or Switches to these articulations. By default you can see that the switches are notes on the keyboard, so by default MainStage is set up for our Option 1 above, keyswitching. This is a big improvement on old versions of MainStage which didn’t provide these out of the gate, but it’s worth bearing in mind that these switches are the default when programming using the plus (+) samples now.
Note that the MIDI Remote button is selected. If this is not enabled your triggers won’t work!
All we need to do now is change the type of switch for the articulations we care about, and delete the others. So, for my example I want tremolo on my pedal. Change Note On for Controller and set the value to 64 (assuming your sustain pedal is sending MIDI control 64, which is the normal value). The value start and end should be 127, as the pedal sends 127 when pressed and 0 when released.
Set the mode to Momentary (Retrigger). This tells MainStage to resend this event every time the value changes, in this case to 127.
Next, change the setting for the Legato articulation to be Controller 64, and Momentary (Retrigger) mode, but set the value start and end both to 0. Finally remove the other articulations, and you should have something like this:
Now, play a chord and when you press the pedal your notes will re-sound as Tremolo. If you want the NEXT notes to be tremolo, but not the ones you’re currently holding then change Momentary (Retrigger) to Momentary. You can have a play with these settings and choose what best suits your needs.
Note that it’s possible to mix and match switch types in this window. For instance, you could add a Velocity based switch type for the Pizzicato articulation in this same window.
In the old days this guide would have been quite a bit longer, as we use a pedal to change the articulation ID by hand, or even, set up two patches — one on strings, one on tremolo, and use the pedal to change mute one and not the other to switch between these sounds, but this is no longer necessary.
You can see the official Apple support documentation here.
Enjoy!