I hate keyswitches (so I made this)

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WHO AM I?
Hey, I’m Zach! I’m a musical world-builder with a passion for public creativity. I compose for games and animations, and coach composers to help them bring their visions to life.

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[ZachHeyde]

Want to master your MIDI mockups? Check out my Orchestral Mockup Fundamentals course!

[imperialdawnaudio]

I have always wondered how to do this. As a rather proficient logic user, I am so ecstatic to see my workflow can improve exponentially as well as resource management!😱

Thanks Zach, your videos are always informative and fun.😄 Your personality is very people friendly and I love watching you get excited, it makes me so happy!😊

[CurtisSchweitzer]

What has always bugged me is the fact that it isn't like the articulations themselves aren't standardized-- no one is going to try to play a pizzicato flute-- so I don't get why there isn't something in the VST or VST2 or whatever spec for a DAW to say: this note spicatto, this note staccato, this note something else, etc. You could even have a few assignable empty ones for weird things that the VST dev wants to do.

Honestly I have been doing most of my recent work in StaffPad for this reason. If I want staccato, I write a staccato note. If I want pizz, I write pizz. Etc.

Keyswitches were always a clever hack-- that they are still around is baffling to me.

Great video!

[rgferreira]

This video is pure liquid gold for many reasons, but among them my favorite is: THE MANUAL 😅 Thanks and good luck with your recent project C&C community. Best regards from Spain.

[TomBaxterMusic]

Hi Zach. Big fan of your tutorials. As an established composer and songwriter I still green tricks off you which are very enlightening to my work flow. My question to you is I’m wondering why you don’t use ‘Art conductor’ ? It’s a great way getting clarity in the many libraries we store.
Would love to hear back from you on this . Best wishes
Tom

[ReubenCornell]

Worth investigating libraries by Impact Soundworks and Red Room Audio that have inbuilt ways to change keyswitches to other control methods... velocity switching, pedal, MIDI CC etc etc

[RachelHardy]

Hey Zach! Do you know how to get Touch OSC to switch articulation templates depending on what instrument patch is loaded in Logic?

[kaptainkool]

As a longtime FL Studio diehard, I'm curious how you'd do this in FL Studio. I've tried BRSO Articulate, using the Midi-Out plugin, etc. But as far as I can see, there's so simple, easy, straightforward way to create a template to easily switch between articulations.

Nice video though, great insight into seeing how you personally do it in your DAW.

[turtles]

Thank you so much for this! Came here after I realized I hated key switching too

[CharlesParente]

Mahalo, Zach. Keyswitching (KS) means you will end up with more than 1 articulation per midi track (the solo Vln track might have sus, then stay, then port, etc). Don't you mix down with one track per articulation anyway? I'm trying to understand how KS itself is actually helpful here.

[Med]

It worked for me on Studio One, thank you

[wxcn]

Agreed, never liked keyswitches as well. Each instrument has its own set of articulations and the faster you get lost as the template grows. I'm working in Cubase with Expression Maps and I don't think I will look back soon. I checked out Logic's articulations but I found Cubase EMap way more powerfull. Also the UI is very nice because it shows all the articulations the respective instruments have at once. No drop down menu etc. There are some crazy stupid flaws to Expression Maps and they should be redone from scratch completely (programming interface is a bad joke), but for me the functionality seems the best on the marked.

I also had an iPad with Lemur setup but I did not like the absence of tactile buttons so my preferred device is the Elgato Stream Deck plus a lil programmable keyboard from china which is called the Koolertron. But using an app for starters was nice to get a feel for the shortcuts though for me. But I'm sure it works well on touch devices for many people since these apps appear so popular.

[DJaycerOfficial]

This would have really helped me if I had the money to purchase these things. I’ve said many times but miss score just isn’t the way to go for writing orchestral music. All it really does is make you feel like a professional writer, but instead you’re wasting your time since doing it the old fashioned way is much easier and much less work.

[anatomicallymodernhuman]

I wanna see a vid about what trauma has made you want to avoid CC values of zero. Is it an aversion to the abstraction of nothingness, or did you once use some software that was buggy in that regard?

[darrinsiberia]

i prefer keyswitches for example with cello. if i have a melodic line and suddenly i switch between legato and spiccato i want to see the melody in one line, not jumped between two tracks. also i can slide my keyswitches so i always have them the same and i have memorized them by now.

[psriniv]

Friggin Pro Tools doesn't have any of this functionality. I'm supremely jealous lol. (okay it DOES have TouchOSC compat but being able to make an articulation set, select some notes in piano roll and just switch them like that is incredible)

[homeofcreation]

You can save yourself a lot of work if you head over to Babylonwaves.

[es__music]

Babylon Waves Art Conductor is a life saver!

[SaveManWoman]

Keys 🎹 being played is what musicians want but buttons with our velocity just doesn’t do it for me. But great for recordings, just not live. Most of us never sell these master pieces we create in our head. My AI does most of this stuff pretty easily now. It’s great to understand how samples are called. In recent months I have moved away from sample base systems. SWAM is amazing for that. Great video for understanding.

[jenssieckmann]

Nice video, Zach. Seems to be really helpful. For what I've seen with the Logic articulation switches regarding CSS: it seems to me that you cannot cover all articulations, at least not with CC58 alone. For example you shouldn't be able to switch to marcato legato. Legato on/off is a switch, so must trigger CC58 with two values, one for marcato and one for the legato on.
I use Studio One with the builtin sound variations tool that cover circumstances like that.