H.A.L.
Hyper Acoustic Legato (H.A.L.) gives you the freedom to play legato instruments your way! Single notes and chords, fast and slow, overlapping or separated - it’s all up to you.
Let’s start with the basics: what is legato? In sampled and software instruments, legato is essentially the transition between two notes. So, when recording a legato for a flute, we record the player slurring from every note to every other note. When you play this legato technique, you get these transitions, greatly increasing the realism. For comparison, try playing a solo line using a sustain part (which lacks these transitions), and then switch to the legato part.
In Soundpaint, you can control how these parts work with the Legato rack module. Below the on/off switch and the part selector/link, the first option you can select is polyphonic vs monophonic. Basically, monophonic means one note, and polyphonic means multiple notes. The rack module defaults to polyphonic, since you can also play just one note at a time with this option, but monophonic can be preferable in some situations. For example, if you’re playing some very fast notes and want to avoid accidentally playing chords, monophonic mode will take care of it.
CHORD TIMER
Next, we have the chord timer, which controls how long you have to play multiple notes before Soundpaint will instead play a transition. So, if you set this to the maximum of 2000 ms, you will have 2 full seconds to add notes after you play the first note; after 2 seconds, you will trigger a transition to the new note(s) instead of adding the note to the chord. The minimum here is 40ms, but you might need a bit longer if you’re playing complicated chords or, like many of us, aren’t virtuoso keyboard players.
MONO THRESHOLD
In monophonic mode, this control becomes mono threshold, allowing you to adjust the sensitivity of what is and is not a single note transition. For instance, if this is set to 250 ms, if you accidentally hit more than one note in that time, only the last note will play. So, if you’re playing fast passages, you should leave this at a low value; if you tend to accidentally play some extra notes, a higher value might be better.
LEGATO TIME
The Legato Time control gives you time between notes to trigger transitions. For older legato styles, we always had to play overlapping notes, but H.A.L gives us more control! Increasing this value will give you time between notes to play, while still triggering the legato transitions. This means that, at a value of 1000ms, you can lift your finger off a key and play a note a full second later, and still get the legato transition. Higher time values here can be especially useful in polyphonic mode, where you might not have enough fingers to actually overlap all the notes!
LEGATO SPEED & VOLUME
Legato Speed and Legato Volume are more self-explanatory. They control the speed and volume of the legato transitions between notes specifically. So, if you need the notes to play faster, increase the speed! If you want to bring out the transition without turning up the volume for the whole part, just turn up the legato volume. For instance, you might really like the sound of a sliding portamento, so you could emphasize that aspect of the sound individually.