That is the question, and I’ll be looking at the pros and cons of each in this article.

Before we get into the detail, don’t forget to like, comment and share this post and come and find me on my social channels.

So, what are keyswitch patches? Well, rather than having a single patch for each articulation, keyswitches are a single patch that allow you to switch between articulations using keys on the keyboard that are out of the range of the instrument. For example, a violin section patch might have keyswitches for marcato, legato, pizzicato, spiccato and so on, and a selection of keys at the lower end of the keyboard are assigned to each articulation. As you select each keyswitch the articulation changes. I’m using the Composer Cloud libraries from @eastwestsounds (soundsonline.com) for this track and it includes keyswitch patches in many of its instruments. As most musical phrases consist of a range of articulations, keyswitches seem a good way of providing control within a single instrument, but is there a price to pay for this functionality?

As is so often he case, there isn’t a straight forward answer to that question and it will come down to personal choice and your requirements, but let’s look at a few of the key points (no pun intended).

The first advantage of a Keyswitch patch is that it can reduce the size of your template. Rather than having numerous articulations for your first violins, each on a separate track, you can have just one track. So your string section will consist of five tracks, for example, rather than upwards of twenty-five. Even a relatively small template, with each articulation is on a separate track, will consist of eight hundred to well over a thousand tracks. Using Keyswitch patches can reduce this considerably and make it easier to navigate around your template.

Second comes processing power. Once you have loaded your KS patch, you can add as many instances of the same patch as you like, and it won’t increase the amount of RAM being used. So you could use the same violin patch for your first violins and your second violins without making more demands on your system.

Finally, if you need to produce a score from your DAW files there will be less MIDI cleaning to do, as you will simply need to remove the KS notes and the instrument part is already on one track, which can be imported into your scoring software to be marked up with expression etc.

So, keyswitches can make your workflow faster, demand less resources of your system and require less preparation time before exporting to score. So why use anything other than keyswitch patches?

Well, there are a number of things that might put you off using them. Firstly, they can be quite difficult to use as you play, so you will probably resort to recording your part using one articulation and then adding in the keyswitch changes later to create the expression that you want. Also, the track will play the articulation that was last triggered, so during the composing process you can often find you play the instrument and it isn’t set to the right articulation.

From a creative aspect, a single sample may not be quite the sound you want so you might duplicate a marcato part to a spiccato track and mix the two to create the sound you’re looking for. This can’t be done if you have a single track for your keyswitch patch. You could create a separate track for each articulation and assign them all the same KS patch, as it won’t increase the RAM, and then add a KS note as the beginning of the track to make sure it plays the correct articulation. This is actually a good way of having the flexibility of a larger template without the increase in RAM, but limits your articulations to those within the patch. If you have different tracks for articulation across several libraries, you can be far more creative with your sounds.

Many composers like to group their instruments by articulation categories such as short strings, long strings etc, which is much easier with separate patches than with keyswitches. The routing of your template is a great way of speeding up your mixing workflow and being more flexible, giving you more control.

As I said early on there is no straight answer but what I and many other composer do is create a template that uses a balance of single samples and keyswitch patches. This allows you to write with speed but then break up the KS part and allocate it to single articulation samples as required, to get the best overall sound. You can also have complete control over your routing and how you manage your mixing workflow. Finally, you can do all this whilst balancing out the demand on your computer resources.

Let me know what you do in the comments and whether you have a preference for KS patches or single articulations.

Next week I’ll be looking at the mic position functionality in some sample libraries and how it can give you even more control over your sound.

’till then

#composer #computermusic #musicproduction