Realistic Trills & Grace Notes

[UCG Musician]

I'm working on an orchestral score that utilizes trills (primarily in the violins) and/or grace notes.  How can the notes be entered so they don't sound mechanical and — ideally IF POSSIBLE — don't take up vast amounts of notes in a measure so all the other longer duration notes (quarters, half notes, whole notes) are spread out?  I hope this question makes sense.  Specifically I want a trill over two tied whole notes to sound like it does when a violin section plays them, not like alternating 16th or 32nd notes.

Similarly, grace notes appear before the note and there seems to be a trick to entering them so they sound realistic.  In this particular case, I have a quarter note, followed by two eights, followed by two sixteenth-note grace notes followed by another quarter note.  It all comes out sounding like a non-distinct blurring of sounds, not like music.  Help!

Does anyone have tips/experience on this?

[Amberwolf]

Part of how you create these short, often-overlapping sounds depends on how the synth you are using actually works, and how it plays a specific note, how it's legato works (if it has that function), how it retriggers notes, how it handles note on vs note off, etc.

Some synths do these things in realistic ways, and some don't.  Some actually have specific samples you must trigger to get the effect you want, and some have specific ways of sending the data to get the result. 

 

When i poke around over at VI-Control forums (where quite a few orchestral composers post tips and tricks) I didn't find any general ways of doing it; it seems to be dependent on the synth or sample library being used. 

 

[kitekrazy1]

I'd listen to recordings of something similar.

[Canopus]

5 hours ago, UCG Musician said:

I'm working on an orchestral score that utilizes trills (primarily in the violins) and/or grace notes.  How can the notes be entered so they don't sound mechanical and — ideally IF POSSIBLE — don't take up vast amounts of notes in a measure so all the other longer duration notes (quarters, half notes, whole notes) are spread out?  I hope this question makes sense.  Specifically I want a trill over two tied whole notes to sound like it does when a violin section plays them, not like alternating 16th or 32nd notes.

As I don’t know your background, I may say things you already know very well. If so, bear with me.

You don’t mention what plugin you’re using, but I must assume that it’s a string library with a number of articulations. If it’s only got legato, then I don’t think it’s possible to get realistically sounding trills out of it. Simply put, look for a plugin library with a Trills articulation. Here’s one example from Native Instruments:

As for human feel, any orchestral library, worthy of its name, would use round-robins. Basically, they record a number of samples that contain the same note, but as it’s recordings of human performers, each sound will differ slightly. The plugin will then switch between different versions of that sound, so that it feels more human.