Expression Map Creator

Expression Map Creator (EMC) is a tool for quickly creating expression maps for use in Cubase.

The reason for the creation of this tool is to save time setting up and maintaining expression maps, which is a cumbersome manual process. To achieve this EMC loads instruments and the articulations (+ additional information like keyswitches, midi channel, etc.) from a single or a collection of yaml files. This allows you to quickly copy those yaml files and adjust per instrument/library. You can use that same file to do any updates to your expression maps, and then just regenerate the expression map for it.

Download

The latest versions of EMC are compiled for both windows and OSX (arm64) so that you may just download a single binary file.

You can find these in the release page: https://github.com/simonsteur/expression-map-creator/releases/tag/v1.0.0

How to use

Create one or multiple yaml files that maps the instruments and articulations you want to create an expression map for. Use the following syntax:

map:
  SSS Violins 1:
    legato:
      ks: 0
      chan: 1
  SSS Violins 2:
    long-cs:
      ks: 1
      chan: 2

You can now load the files that you created into EMP and create your expression maps.

Parameters

You can specify several parameters per articulation, this way you can control the midi actions. These parameters are the following (defaults are cubase defaults):

parameter	usage	default
ks	midi note number for the articulations keyswitch (example: C-2 = 0)	0
chan	midi channel	1
vel	velocity	1
length	length	1
min-vel	minimum velocity	0
max-vel	maximum velocity	127
min-pitch	minimum pitch	0
max-pitch	maximum pitch	127
transpose	transpose	0
remote	keyswitch to assign as remote to the articulation	starts at 0 (C-2), then counts up from there.
type	type of articulation. (attribute or direction)	direction

Midi note numbers (C3=60 mapping)

octave	C	C#	D	D#	E	F	F#	G	G#	A	A#	B
-2	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11
-1	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23
0	24	25	26	27	28	29	30	31	32	33	34	35
1	36	37	38	39	40	41	42	43	44	45	46	47
2	48	49	50	51	52	53	54	55	56	57	58	59
3	60	61	62	63	64	65	66	67	68	69	70	71
4	72	73	74	75	76	77	78	79	80	81	82	83
5	84	85	86	87	88	89	90	91	92	93	94	95
6	96	97	98	99	100	101	102	103	104	105	106	107
7	108	109	110	111	112	113	114	115	116	117	118	119
8	120	121	122	123	124	125	126	127

Run EMC from source code

If you wish to run EMC without downloading the compiled binaries you can, just follow the following steps:

Install the pip dependencies as defined in the requirements file.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Execute main.py to launch the gui. You can also pass in arguments to run the tool completely within the cli.

python3 /src/main.py