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-   -   Using GPO and Composer (http://www.notation.com/vb-forum/showthread.php?t=2106)

Sherry Crann (sherry) 06-09-2005 04:42 AM

Howdy, If the soundfont thr
 
Howdy,

If the soundfont thread wasn't enough ..... http://www.notation.com/discus/clipart/happy.gif

Then there's Garritan Personal Orchestra!

Briefly, GPO is an orchestral library, with many instruments, each with variants of articulation and players of those instruments, which can be orchestrated (pun intended) to make some wonderful sounding music.

Composer/Pro makes the task of making great music much easier than it could be because Composer/Pro is so extremely intuitive to use. GPO is heavily reliant on controllers for fine-tuning the performance of the instruments, and Composer/Pro makes that pretty easy with the graphing capabilities, the midi event list, and the special instrument key-switching and mid-track voice change capabilities that it has.

To hear the difference that a good sound library makes, you can visit my mp3 page at www.soundclick.com/beanfieldcastle and listen to the three versions of Communion Aire. The sound card version is done with just the FM quality sounds on my soundcard. The soundfont version was done with the Chaos soundfont, and the GPO version is done with GPO instruments. I think it's a pretty convincing comparison, as the same .not file was used (with negligible variation) for all the recordings.

(the following is an amalgamation, with minimal editing, of previous bits and pieces from around the forum, so please forgive any redundancies)
************************************************** ***********

Yes, you can use GPO with Composer - I've been using it for a while now, and really enjoy it!

First, if you haven't yet, I would strongly recommend reading through the GPO user's guide (not the entire Help documentation, but the small booklet that comes with it) as it will give you lots of pointers on using GPO with sequencing software, which is essentially what you need to know about using it with Composer.

To begin, you'll have to run Personal Orchestra Studio (if you didn't get this in your initial GPO disc package, it should be available at the GPO website as a free download). Be sure to run this first, before you start up Composer. Then, start Composer (you'll have to run them concurrently).

If you know what instruments you'll be wanting to use, go ahead and load them in one of the "players" in Personal Studio (you have up to 8 players, with 8 slots for instruments within each player).

In Composer, open the file that you want to use the GPO instruments with. For each track (the Track/Track setup dialog is more convenient here than choosing each track button individually), you can then choose which player and instrument to use.

In the Track Setup dialog, you'll see under Device, "GPO Studio 1", "GPO Studio 2", etc, which corresponds to the "Player 1", "Player 2", etc. that you see in the Personal Studio setup. Then for the Channel in the track setup, you choose which slot in the Player you have for a particular instrument.

For example, say that you have a file in Composer that has a flute track, a trumpet track, and a harp track (yes, I'm making this up :-) ) Then for Personal Studio, in Player 1, you have flute in the first slot, trumpet in the second slot, and harp in the third slot. Your Track Setup would be

Flute track: Device= GPO Studio 1, channel 1
trumpet track: Device = GPO Studio 1, channel 2
harp track: Device= GPO Studio 1, channel 3

I find Composer quite helpful in using GPO because you can use the graphing capabilities to sort of automate controller events (like the mod wheel, which my keyboard doesn't have) that can profoundly affect the performance of the GPO instruments. You may need to alter some of these controllers in files that you find on the internet, as some of the controllers for "regular" midi files have specific functions for some GPO instruments, and they may need "tweaking" to make the GPO instrument performance optimal.

Also, I should mention that you can save whatever instrument setup you have in GPO Personal Studio for each song. Then, when you want to work on a song, you can just open up that file in Personal Studio before you open up Composer, and you're all set. I usually save mine in the same folder that I have my song from Composer in, so that I always have them together.

Regarding possible memory issues:
Another related note is that I've had a few MIDI files that I tried with GPO and Composer, and I found that the instruments sounded "stuttered." What I found with these is that some MIDI files have "tracks" that don't have any notes in them - they're used solely to "mark" space so that the person who sequenced the file could put in text information, such as their name, email addy, any other credits, etc. If I left these tracks in, the stuttering continued. But when I removed these tracks (deleted them, rather than just hiding them) the stuttering problem went away. I'm presuming that this is probably because my memory was borderline for those files, with trying to "check" all those empty tracks, and that eliminating them sort of "focused" on the music tracks. Not sure of all the techno-geek stuff there, but I offer it as an observation with a solution :-)

I'm very blessed to have GPO as an option for generating sound, and what I find with that is that at a basal level, all the instruments always sound nice. But you still have a lot of controller parameters that can alter things a lot, especially the mod wheel, which is used with GPO sort of as a volume swell type of controller, which isn't necessarily at all what it is used for with other midi files. There are controllers that control attack, sustain, and all sorts of other aspects of the sound, and when I'm using GPO I find myself trying out as many different things with it to get an even better sound as I do when I'm tweaking soundfonts, albeit for different reasons. So there is a lot going on there, too.

All that said, even when the GPO instruments are playing a less than perfectly sequenced piece (which means a piece that I haven't tweaked to tailor to the particular controllers for GPO instruments) they still sound nicer than the soundfonts, and lightyears beyond most sound card default sounds. The performance may not sound totally natural, but I've always found it to be more pleasing even in those instances.

And it's much easier to get a natural sounding performance with GPO instruments than with most soundfont instruments partly because with a lot of soundfonts, you may get something of an "attack" and usually a nice "sustain", but very rarely do you get an "ending" that sounds anything better than just an abrupt cessation of sound. With GPO, the sound sampling is just so much better (and takes up so much more space as a consequence :-) ) that it's amazing. It also comes with Ambience, a nice reverb effector that lets you choose many parameters of reverb that can greatly affect the performance sound, too.

I should mention here that I upgraded my memory from 512 Mb to 1.5 Gb, and I can load an entire orchestra worth of instruments and have not had any major issues. One thing that I always do, though, when loading a lot of instruments is to turn off absolutely all nonessential processes on the computer before I start working on a song, including (temporarily) things like the printer in the tray. This way I don't get any interruptions or glitches because something else is suddenly sucking off a chunk of CPU capacity.

Okay, that's it for me for now http://www.notation.com/discus/clipart/happy.gif Uncross your eyes and start making music!

ttfn,
Sherry


06-23-2005 04:39 AM

Thanks Sherry for your help in
 
Thanks Sherry for your help in making the tutorial "Using Garritan Personal Orchestra in MidiNotate Composer". And thanks to Mark for writing this 35 page thorough guide. And a special thanks to David Walsen for the awesome graphics.

I put up the tutorial on my site. It can be viewed here:

http://www.garritan.com/tutorial/Mid...POTutorial.htm

I like MidiNotate's ability to do controller tweaking right on the score. It's also easy to use and intuitive. There's alot I like.

All the best,

Gary Garritan

Erwin O (erdax) 09-13-2005 02:55 PM

Hi I have (maybe a dump
 
Hi

I have (maybe a dump) question about using the volume in gpo.
Raising or lowering the Ctrl Graph Volume doesn't affect the GPO Studio, only changing the loudness of each note works but that isn't the correct way to do so. It's only helpfull for the moment.

I couldn't find anything about it in the GPO manual.

Oh, it works fine with my soundcard (the volume graph)

Thanks
.....Erwin

Sherry Crann (sherry) 09-13-2005 04:42 PM

Howdy Erwin, Trust me - the
 
Howdy Erwin,

Trust me - there are no dumb questions! GPO is a wonderful library, and there are so many variables that you can use to get so many nuances out of the instruments, that it can be a bit boggling!

With GPO, the "attack" of the notes is dependent on the Mod wheel. You can still use the volume control to control the volume of that attack, but you must have some sort of mod wheel value that's high enough to get GPO to give you sound.

So, you can do things a couple of ways. If you're just messing about with GPO, you can use either the mod wheel on your MIDI keyboard to work with volume, or you can use the mod wheel on the virtual keyboard for GPO.

When using Composer, if you're recording into the program and want to use the mod wheel for volume and dynamics, Composer will record these as you perform on your MIDI keyboard. Or, if you want to edit the Mod wheel graph after you enter your notes, you can do it that way, too. This allows you to either set a constant value, or to use the Mod wheel graph to get some very convincing dynamics out of the instrument performances.

I hope this is helpful!
Sherry


Mark Walsen (markwa) 09-13-2005 05:32 PM

Hello Erwin, Sherry's t
 
Hello Erwin,

Sherry's tips are good. Also, be sure to check out the Composer/GPO tutorial at www.notation.com/MidiNotateComposerGPOTutorial.htm.

Cheers
-- Mark



Erwin O (erdax) 09-13-2005 09:46 PM

My God, why couldn't I thi
 
My God, why couldn't I think about that. I knew the Mod Wheel was used for volume and dynamics but in Composer I didn't think about it.
Thanks anyway for being the guide.

Yes, I use your tutorial Mark, it's a very good one but because I'm going Digital I'm reading a lot of tutorials and that isn't always easy.

Cheers
......Erwin


Clyde (clyde) 02-02-2006 11:45 AM

Hi Mark, I have been experi
 
Hi Mark,
I have been experimenting with GPO as the solo instrument with my BIAB pieces while using the Roland VSC as the backing band. (Hope to transfer more instruments to GPO once I get it working correctly).
I save the BIAB midi file, and then use Composer to drive GPO.

However, I noticed that the volume of all melody notes played by GPO is the same.

I read your notes Mark, and I think you are saying that I change the note velocity and volume curves I should be able to get GPO to change volume.

However, I could not get this to work, and so did a small test file in Composer.

The attached WORD file has a 4 bar test score, playing the same note at different velcities and volumes (as indicated in the Composer score), but yet the output file from GPO shows the wave file amplitude for each of the notes is the same. The attached MP3 file indicates the same thing.

<center><table border=1><tr><td>http://www.notation.com/discus/icons...hment_icon.gifWORD
GPO_Composer.doc (25.6 k)</td></tr></table></center>
<center><table border=1><tr><td>http://www.notation.com/discus/icons...hment_icon.gifMP3
GPO-sample.mp3 (48.7 k)</td></tr></table></center>

What am I doing wrongly?

With thanks ... Clyde



Sherry Crann (sherry) 02-02-2006 02:42 PM

Howdy Clyde, I'm not M
 
Howdy Clyde,

I'm not Mark, nor do I play him on T.V. http://www.notation.com/discus/clipart/happy.gif

However, I think the short answer to your question is "Mod Wheel".

GPO instruments rely heavily on the mod wheel for their dynamics, and the mod wheel actually gives more "life" to the performance than just volume changes will. You can use the MIDI graphing capabilities of Composer to achieve a lot with GPO instruments.

I'm attaching a couple of files for you that I put together to demonstrate this. The .not has some annotations about what I did where, so you can follow (hopefully it's clear enough) what I did while listening. You can also look at the graphs to see what's happening. The other is the .gpo file that I used with it, so you'll have the same starting point.

I used three different parameters - volume, note velocity, and mod wheel, and I changed them separately, and as a group, to show how they can be used separately or together to achieve different results.

I hope this is helpful, and if you have any other questions, just holler http://www.notation.com/discus/clipart/happy.gif

ttfn,
Sherry

<center><table border=1><tr><td>http://www.notation.com/discus/icons...hment_icon.gifGPO french horn demo
GPO french horn dynamics.not (12.4 k)</td></tr></table></center>
<center><table border=1><tr><td>http://www.notation.com/discus/icons...hment_icon.gifGPO french horn demo
GPO french horn dynamics.gpo (37.5 k)</td></tr></table></center>

Sherry Crann (sherry) 02-02-2006 02:48 PM

p.s. Clyde, I should have m
 
p.s. Clyde,

I should have mentioned that even if you don't want to make mod wheel changes for the dynamics, you still have to have the mod wheel turned up (you can give it a fixed value) for the other MIDI parameters to have much effect. This may well be the problem that you're experiencing. The current default for the mod wheel in Composer is "0", because the mod wheel usually has a very different function for other sound engines than GPO. So you'll need to at least set a constant value for it for any GPO instrument staff.

ttfn,
Sherry

Sherry Crann (sherry) 02-02-2006 03:28 PM

Howdy Clyde, It just occurr
 
Howdy Clyde,

It just occurred to me that you have the Big Band version, rather than GPO, so you may not have a french horn. I just tried the file out with other instruments (such as clarinet) and it worked fine for demonstrating the differences in the controllers.

ttfn,
Sherry

Clyde (clyde) 02-02-2006 11:41 PM

Hi Sherry, Thanks for the
 
Hi Sherry,
Thanks for the explanation and demo files. What your demo seems to say to me is:
(a) That GPO does not really use note velocity for volume control. It uses the 'Loudness' and 'Modulation' controls.
(b) Midi files that use note 'velocity' for volume control (eg BIAB) will not work correctly within GPO, unless 'velocity' controls are changed to either 'Loudness' or 'Modulation'.

Have I understood you correctly?

I notice on the Garritan web page that for some packages there are 'plug ins' to do this conversion of translating 'velocity' to what GPO requires.

Is there a feature like this already in Composer? Or do you know of a stand alone package that does this conversion (ie converts the midi file before it is read into Composer)?

Cheers ... Clyde

Sherry Crann (sherry) 02-03-2006 02:20 AM

Howdy Clyde, You wrote: &
 
Howdy Clyde,

You wrote:
(a) That GPO does not really use note velocity for volume control. It uses the 'Loudness' and 'Modulation' controls.
(b) Midi files that use note 'velocity' for volume control (eg BIAB) will not work correctly within GPO, unless 'velocity' controls are changed to either 'Loudness' or 'Modulation'.

Sherry replies:
Well, mostly http://www.notation.com/discus/clipart/happy.gif

GPO does use note velocity to a certain extent. You should have heard - as well as been able to see on an audio file display - that note velocities do indeed affect the loudness to some extent. That said, note velocities are used for a lot of instruments to vary the "attack" on the note, more than the absolute loudness of the note. The volume of the track/staff also affects the perceived loudness of the instrument more than the note velocities , but the mod wheel does indeed rule with GPO instruments. It's used to simulate what would happen if a player were blowing or playing harder on their instrument, so that it's not only a louder sound, but in some cases the timbre of the sound changes, also, in the same way that bowing harder on a stringed instrument produces a different timbre than a softly bowed part. And I'm sure Fred could enlighten us about the nuances of blowing on a sax http://www.notation.com/discus/clipart/happy.gif

I honestly haven't looked into any of the "MIDI event transposing" type apps, though I know that there are indeed a few out there. You may want to also check the Garritan forum for such applications that other users may recommend.

The other option is to just put in the MIDI graph information yourself in Composer, using the Graph view, and then selecting "Mod wheel" as the parameter to be graphed. It's actually pretty quick and easy, and you get to do the controlling http://www.notation.com/discus/clipart/happy.gif

ttfn,
Sherry

Mike Kat 09-27-2007 11:26 PM

I'm having a lot of diffic
 
I'm having a lot of difficulties.

After I installed GPO, Notation Composer will no longer open. When I open up GPO Studio, it explains that it could not find any Garritan libraries, and to please reinstal GPO. I did this, and nothing changed.

Can anybody help?

Tim Fatchen (flyingtadpole) 09-28-2007 11:44 AM

Mike, I had a similar issue at
 
Mike, I had a similar issue at the time but as I'm prone to computers falling over (it's my animal magnetism, I'm sure) I thought it was just me. It probably was, but... What I did in the end (FIRST backing up all songs that were in the Notation folder) was uninstall the lot, then new-install GPO studio and GPO, which I had to do a couple of times to get the multis up (a known installation problem, see the Garritan website where there turns out to be a simpler fix which, obviously, I didn't look for until I no longer needed it).

Once GPO AND Garritan Studio were installed and working, I new-installed Composer which opened without problems, played music but made no sound. At that stage I went into the MIDI devices quick setup and made sure this tiem I'd setup Garritan Studio 1, Studio 2 etc as devices, THEN it all worked.

I have no idea why GPO didn't properly install, or why Composer may or may not have taken offence. I do know that it took me five attempts to install MS Office 2000 (full legal professional version)when I last did it, so that it worked properly on my systems, (and there were still odd drivers missing....they were on the cd, just didn't install).

I just work on the basis that once a program is huge, which is especially the case for GPO, things don't always read or get read. Or alternatively, computers often do things for no apparent reason, a belief firmly established in 1968 and which I've never had reason to shift from. Mark or the more technically minded might have a better fix, but I'd just try again.

Mark Walsen (markwa) 09-28-2007 04:40 PM

Hello Kat,


 
Hello Kat,

<blockquote><hr size=0><!-quote-!><font size=1>quote:</font>

After I installed GPO, Notation Composer will no longer open. When I open up GPO Studio, it explains that it could not find any Garritan libraries, and to please reinstal GPO. I did this, and nothing changed.<!-/quote-!><hr size=0></blockquote>My understanding here is that the basic problem with Notation Composer now is that it will not start.

The first thing to try is restarting Windows, which is a cure for so many installation problems, such as might have been caused by the GPO or Kontakt Player installers.

If restarting Windows doesn't help, then I suspect that Notation Composer is severely confused about the GPO MIDI devices (Garritan Studio 1, Studio 2, etc.). If that is the case, then Notation Composer is at blame. You can probably work around this problem by deleting the file named mididev.cfg in \Program Files\Notation\Composer. Also, if you find a same-named file mididev.cfg in the parent directly \Program Files\Notation, then delete it also.

Please let us know which of the above cures the problem for you, or not.

Cheers
-- Mark

Mike Kat 09-30-2007 12:19 AM

Thanks, I got Notation working
 
Thanks, I got Notation working now (it was the mididev.cfg file). I'm going to try installing GPO and Studio again now.


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