Any recommendations for pre-delay in BBC Core?

RPerrillo

Just getting started with using BBC Core and I'm sure I will encounter other patches that need tweaking in this regard, but currently struggling with getting a simple French Horn Legato line to "line up" with tempo. Trying to drag it Logic's piano roll hasn't worked well. It's a very simple two bar phrase in 3/4 time. Three quarter notes followed by 2 eighth notes and a half note to finish out the second bar. The problems are with the eighth notes. DAW tempo is 68 bpm. I even tried assigning a short articulation (thank you SA for the articulation set) to the second eighth note to help, but still just doesn't lay right.

Has anyone spent the time to make note of pre-delay settings across the entire range of this library? Would you mind sharing?

Lastly, and I'm sure I can't be alone in this wish; I would gladly pay a premium for two more mic positions in Core. I have encountered some odd frequency resonances in certain instruments that no amount of EQ tweaking seems to resolve, but I believe having some mic blending options would help.

aldous

If you're using articulation sets, then I guess you've got multiple articulations in the same track? The delay is very different for different articulations, so I don't think you can have both short notes and long notes sitting on the grid if they're in the same track with the same delay. For the legato articulation alone, I find there's big difference between the first note of a legato phrase vs the later notes because of the different transitions; e.g. on the BBCSO Horn I make the difference around 30ms. If you play the same note in succession on a legato articulation, that can sound strange too, depending on the size of the gap. I also find delay can vary a bit for different notes and velocities on the same articulation, but not as much and usually in a way that sounds natural to me.

So, if I'm using delay I split the notes up by articulation, or at least shorts and longs. The delay amount is of course relative to what you're syncing against, and pretty subjective too I expect... My starting point is usually about -100ms for legatos, -70ms for longs and -25ms for shorts, but some instruments end up substantially different. As an example, I tried to roughly line up the BBCSO single horn with Logic's metronome, and needed about -85ms for legato (based on legato transition, so first note might need to be a bit behind the grid), -75ms for long, -35ms for staccatissimo at 50% tightness, with about +/-20ms for 100% vs 0% tightness.

Hope that's some help?

RPerrillo

Thank you very much, Aldous. You bring to light a lot of useful information. I had not considered the different delay characteristics based on shorts vs longs. I did initially use delay before trying to add the shorter articulation, but did not consider to turn it off off when re-assigning the one eighth note to a short. I will see how doing so may help. And thank you for those delay numbers as a ballpark reference for me. I've only undertaken making music on the computer for one year, driven completely by live performing vanishing in the Covid era. As a jazz pianist of 40 yrs I never considered that there would be complexity beyond my ability to just play anything I needed into Logic. Many lessons still to be learned.

Thanks again!

aldous

Thanks, glad it was useful! I'm sure other people will have more input on their workflow: there seem to be lots of different approaches. I wonder if you've tried playing the phrase entirely in legato, say, then again entirely in staccatissimo on a second track... would you naturally play ahead/behind to compensate for the different articulations? If so, that might be a faster way for you to add the right delays... or, if you want to pull the notes to the grid, to read off the amount of delay you find natural. I'm not a good/accurate enough player, unfortunately, so I have mixed results doing it this way, but sounds like you might have better luck :-)