Hidden Articulations With Human Playback (Finale 2012)

Not sure if anyone can help me with this, but it's worth a try.

I'm using Finale 2012 with Garritan instruments through VST, and with the "human playback" feature.  I find that for solo strings (e.g. in a string quartet), short notes tend not to "speak" clearly compared with long notes at the same dynamic level.  So, I thought an easy solution to make things sound a little bit better might be to apply an invisible articulation to all, say 16th notes or shorter, that would just slightly increase the velocity of those notes to achieve a better sound.  So, I created an articulation with the playback effect of changing velocity to 105%.

However, this doesn't work; when I play it back, the notes with that articulation are MUCH louder than the rest of the music (far more than 5% louder!).  It seems to make no difference whether I set the articulation to change the velocity to 101% or 150%; anything above 100% makes the note extremely loud. I'm guessing that this is caused by issues with the human playback, but since I don't fully understand how human playback sets dynamic levels, I'm not really sure.

Does anyone have an explanation or, even better, a way for me to boost the loudness of the short notes slightly for the solo string instruments?

I've experienced pretty much the same issue when writing for solo strings (e.g. I've working on the revision of a Violin Sonata, and the comparative weakness of the violin playback annoys me to death). As balance is the key when writing chamber pieces, I hate the result. So what I do for a more realistic playback (esp. when writing shorter notes) is either to add (hidden) accents or to write down a (still hidden) louder dynamic mark side by side with the "official" (and visible) mark (e. g. a hidden "mp" right after a visible "p").

Hidden dynamics are something I hadn't thought of.  Thanks for the suggestion!  They seem to work better, but still cause some issues with human playback.  For instance, I have a figure of a dotted quarter note + 4 32nds at mf, and of course the 32nd notes are almost inaudible.  If I add a hidden f dynamic for the 32nds, they are now played at a reasonable volume - but for some reason, the dotted quarter is now cut very short, as if it had a staccato mark.  So I added a hidden tenuto mark to the dotted quarter, and that seems to more or less do the trick.

I have the opposite problem -- I downloaded a midi file, it looks fine.  In the midst, the music slows down and pauses like there's a fermata, but there's no visible fermata.  Can I get access to it? Like, see it, remove it?

Edited May 16, 20205 yr by montedoro44
missing word