Sibelius and stepper operation

Thanks to John Murdoch's excellent instructions on integrating Sibelius and Hauptwerk (using the vst plugin) from some years ago, I have been able to update and adapt these to make it work for the current Sibelius Ultimate and Hauptwerk 7. With some careful organising of staves, it's possible to obtain conventional looking (and printable) scores and get the notation to accurately play in Hauptwerk on your chosen instrument. Very satisfying!

Where I'm now stuck is getting Sibelius to trigger the right MIDI instruction to activate pistons, or more specifically Hauptwerk's own stepper combination system. Through various searches I have found that, in Sibelius, if I attach the text tag to a note on the great division's stave, "~p1" will operate divisional piston 1 on the great in HW, "~p2" will operate division piston 2, and so on. I cannot find a way of operating the general pistons. This is organ specific, not the generic HW combs system. I think the text ~p1 etc. instructs a MIDI program change command, but could be wrong.

If I right-click on the HW STPR GEN up piston, "Adjust manually (for all organs, unless overridden)" I have all sorts of options for triggering this but none seem to work. I am trying to set it up so that a program change 11 on channel 2 (the great's channel) operates the stepper + function, but nothing. Are the ~p commands defined by Hauptwerk, Sibelius or John Murdoch's custom Sibelius manual soundset files? I also tried using a MIDI note to trigger it - the B below the lowest C on the great manual. To test, I removed all other notes at that point and sure enough HW's yellow indicator lights show this note being received on channel 2, but none of the settings and options I've tried seem to trigger the stepper + from this B note either.

Has anyone got any suggestions? I am using HW 7 Advanced.

Many thanks,
Mark

[mdyde]

Hello Mark,

I don't have recent experience with Sibelius, so can't help in detail but perhaps the following tips might be of help at the Hauptwerk end:

1) You could try temporarily turning on the "General settings | General preferences | Advanced preferences | Diagnostics: log all MIDI messages received and sent" option in Hauptwerk and OK the screen. Then use "View | activity log" after sending the relevant MIDI event from Sibelius, to see the exact message that it sent to Hauptwerk. It will also show which MIDI IN port it was received through, and what Hauptwerk control(s) it triggered, if any.

2) On the "General settings | MIDI ports | MIDI IN ports" screen, if you're routing MIDI from Sibelius to Hauptwerk via the "Hauptwerk MIDI recorder/player external MIDI IN" virtual port (at the very bottom of the list -- e.g. scroll down to see it), then for MIDI messages received through that virtual port, Hauptwerk will respond (exactly and only) to MIDI messages that use the MIDI implementation described via the "Recording | View Hauptwerk MIDI recorder/player fixed, predefined MIDI implementation (for this organ)" menu function. For example, as shown there, to trigger Hauptwerk's native "Trigger stepper frame +1 (increment)" function, you would send MIDI program change number 38 on MIDI channel 7.

3) On the "General settings | MIDI ports | MIDI IN ports" screen, if you're instead routing MIDI from Sibelius to Hauptwerk via one of the "Console MIDI IN" rows, then auto-detected (and/or manually configured) MIDI settings will apply instead.

4) The "Composing pieces off-line from MIDI notation software" sub-section (pages 281-285) of the "MIDI sequencing, the Hauptwerk AU/VST Link and applying external real-time effects plug-ins" chapter of the main Hauptwerk user guide (pages 263-292 in the current v7.0 version) covers the way we normally recommend using notation software with Hauptwerk. I see that John Murdoch's tutorial (which was written for Hauptwerk v4, but the method is largely applicable equally for v7: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8494 ) instead routes MIDI to Hauptwerk via Hauptwerk's "Hauptwerk MIDI recorder/player external MIDI IN" virtual MIDI IN port, so if configuring it the way that John describes then you would need to use the MIDI implementation described in note 2) above.

Hello Martin,

Thank you so much for the quick and detailed reply. This did the trick. Using the predefined MIDI implementation has got me exactly where I need to be for now. In the long term, using the floating divisions looks like the way to go so I will take some time to read up on this.

Thanks again for the excellent support.

Best wishes,
Mark

[mdyde]

Thanks, Mark. Excellent. You're very welcome.