Hey all, first off I fully expect to have picked the wrong section but I couldn't figure it out, so bear with me... newbie, etc.

What are you guys doing when you need to produce convincing piano trills? I find that with most ornaments, Note Performer gets my midi data close to what I want, but when it comes to trills, it fails miserably. Editing manually each note for a trill that's a couple of bar long seems very tedious and hasn't yielded convincing results so far. For other instruments I would just use a library that has trill samples, but the piano VST I use or know about don't offer that.

I would really appreciate your help here

 

I draw in the notes of my trill over the entire length of the trill, set my grid division to something that ~roughly corresponds to the speed of the trill and hit 'generate arp'. Humanize or shift notes afterwards.

kawa_MIDI_GenerateArp.lua for Reaper in my case.

 

Thank you Xorome - it's an arpegiator script? I'm struggling a bit to understand how this would work, but maybe we're not starting from the same place. In my case my score editor will already have generated the trill if I have set it on a particular note. For instance I have a C that lasts for a bar and I'll place a trill on it in my score editor, and when I export that bar as midi and put it in my DAW I will already have alternating Cs and Ds at the standard speed for a regular or baroque trill, depending on what I selected. It sounds like your script is just taking care of what my score editor does already, but I might be wrong.
I'm interested in what you are doing manually to make it sound more natural afterwards, though. Do you randomize velocity with a very small range value, or have you figured a recipe that works well?

 

Ah!

Afterwards I'll draw in velocity curves in broad strokes over the entirety of the trill and apply a small bit of humanisation, small enough to preserve the overall shape of the velocity curve I drew in. I then manually fix the notes I don't like.

 

Oh, right! I've been using score editors for a few years now but I'm just starting out with DAWs so I actually was selecting each note's velocity in the piano roll and tweaking it up or down. I had not thought about using velocity automation for that, it sounds like a much better idea, thanks for sharing