Articulations in MuseScore 4, VSTi and Midi v2

• Jan 10, 2022 - 08:36

A newbie/amateur question: If I understand correctly vsti is based on midi 1.0, and midi 1.0 does not support articulations (that the same musical note can sound as a harmonic, or palm muted, staccato, played near the bridge or near the sound hole, etc,etc). I see often vsti instruments for sale that reserve some notes/keys to activate/deactivate a certain type of sounds/articulations. Other instruments split the range of notes and some octaves are used for articulations. All this sound to me like "custom workarounds".

My question is how this all is going to work in Musescore 4 that brings support for VSTi. Will we have to program the settings for each vsti so that when musecore sees a particular articulation in notation it will send the right command to the vst-instrument ?

I hope midi 2.0 brings some native support for articulations in the note-on midi message. Does anyone know if I am right?

I am curious about all this and would be thankful if someone explained to me how MuseScore is going to treat articulations.

Thanks

Comments

Marc Sabatella

• Jan 10, 2022 - 14:24

This stuff is still in development, but see the most recent status update post in the Announcements forum - it's specifically about a new articulations architecture. Details are not yet published, I don't think, but presumably will become more clear one the alpha release happens, hopefully in the next few months.

FWIW, it's not really accurate to say MIDI 1.0 doesn't support articulations at all. It doesn't define one universal way to do it, but there are ways of implementing them using velocity, key switches, continuous controller messages, or other means.