SCS Performance Legato – What the f*ck is that scripting?

Hey, sorry for the provocative title. But I’m a bit pissed off right now. I own Spitfire Chamber Strings and write a lot with the Violins 1 & 2 Legato patches.

Took a lot of time to do a proper comparison between the more recent “Performance Legato” patches and the older “Legato Performance” patches, and while the old patches are far from perfect, I noticed a few retarded things in the new patches that make them almost useless to me:

– For some reason, Portamento transitions have been “removed” from the legato palette, or at least drastically reduced in length / volume. No matter the playing speed or velocity, portamentos sound like basic slurred legato for the vast majority of the intervals.

– Playing multiple notes at a moderate speed and medium velocity (fingered legato) really gives me audible volume bumps, that I do not hear as much in the older patches. There’s an infuriating, constant bumpy feel to the transitions.

– While the vibrato control in the older patches had a nice 3-level crossfade, the vibrato in the newer patches is literally an on/off switch, from non-vib to molto, basically. This is completely stupid and I don’t see any reason they’d have crossfades removed from the patch. You just don’t have the expressiveness that previous patches offered.

All of this is very frustrating to me, cause newer patches have wonderful shorts, and multiple velocity-based attacks that are great for mimicking convincing rebows. Though I’m not sure of the “improvement” in the overall legato transitions compared to the older patches.

While we’re talking about the older patches… In Violins 2 “Legato Performance”, there’s also a terrible volume / dynamics bump in the next note when triggering fingered legato. This only really happens at max vibrato level. As someone pointed out in another thread, sounds like they’re crossfading different dynamics together as the legato transitions are sampled independently from the current dynamics you’re playing at. And to make things worse, high vib samples are mixed significantly louder than “normal” vib (you can test it just by playing a long note and moving the slider).

This can only be somewhat fixed by reducing the vibrato slider to middle position, and the crossfade will be less audible.

Do any of you still use the older patches for the reasons I mentioned above? Have you encountered any of these? Does your current SCS version have these glitches? I’d be happy to post comparisons if anyone is interested!

Thanks guys.