Dual Sounds During Entry. . .also

Hi Jim and company,

I have two questions.  1st, when entering notes (using Sibelius and a Roland HS-60 Synthesizer), I hear two sounds when entering notes depending upon where I am on the staff.  For example, I may hear the true tenor voice I'm entering PLUS a snare-ish sound.  Any thoughts?

2nd. . .I get a lot of big hall like ring from the bass voice.  No reverb is set and I've checked reverb which is set at ";0";.  Any way to ";deaden"; the playback on bass?

Finally, is there a way to ";save"; the VDL2 settings I select or must I set them each and every time I open the program?

Hey Steve,

1st question, what kind of system are you using?  Memory, OS, all that good stuff.

If you're hearing two sounds, then you more than likely missed a step in setup.  First, in Sibelius, click on Play> Devices.  Only your virtual midi cable should be set to on.  Check in your mixer to make sure each staff is only going to one channel.  Also, check in the Kontakt Player to make sure you don't have more than one instrument set on the same channel (that's a common mistake).

If you have the reverb turned off in the Kontakt Player, you shouldn't be hearing too much reverb.  Some natural reverb will occur.  I can't remember where the bass samples were recorded, but I don't hear hardly any reverb in my bass samples.

Sadly, using the Kontakt Player, you can't save your custom settings.  If you use a sampler like Kontakt 2, you can save all your settings.

Hope this helps.
I'll bet the reason you're hearing two sounds is that you're VDL2 is set to receive input from your keyboard as well as your midi driver (virtual midi cable). If you're triggering sounds from Sibelius, be sure (in VDL2) that ONLY the virtual midi cable is set to ";ON";. Your Roland keyboard (or its midi interface driver) should be set to OFF unless of course you're just playing directly between the keyboard and VDL2.

Be sure when checking reverb levels, that you have the correct instrument selected. The reverb settings are independently set for each instrument. I've made the mistake of thinking I was adjusting one instrument (because i was hearing it), even though I had the wrong slot selected in VDL2, thus adjusting settings for the wrong instrument.

As Bill mentioned, most instruments will have some natural reverb from the environment they were recorded in, but you certainly shouldn't be hearing any sort of ";Hall"; style reverb on the basses.

The Kontakt Player interface, while it works well in stand-alone mode, was actually designed largely for people who use it in a host environment (like in a VST host, or a sequencing program). When using it that way, the host program retains all the loaded instruments and settings when you save the session. Or, also as bill mentioned, if you're using them in Kontakt 2, you can save your session as a ";multi"; so you won't have to manually reload each instrument each time.

If you're interested, there's a good list of host programs started in the ";helpful hints"; section. Most of them are very reasonable, and many offer demo versions I believe. There's also a demo version of Kontakt 2 if you want to ";try before you buy.";
Thanks Bill and Jim, I will check out the helpful hints.�� Also, I did note that in ";setup"; in VDL2, in my input interface, my Maple MIDI In and In USB MIDI 1x1 were both ";on";.�� I've turned the USB MIDI to off and will check it out.

Bill, FYI, I'm operating on a Dell system using XP, I have increased my RAM to 1.12GBs.

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