articulations vs dynamics in terms of how much?

Hi Bjarke, welcome to redbanned!

Realism is a bit of a rabbit hole. Nothing beats a live performance and despite every sampling company on the market trying to convince you how realistic their libraries are, it's still a far cry from an actual performance. Perhaps you've already heard that a thousand times and you simply want to get the highest degree of realism out of your samples. If that's the case, I actually have a few questions first.

#1 Who are you doing this for? I'm asking because if you're doing composing as a hobby and you simply want to get the best performance for your own satisfaction, you can probably afford the time to noodle around to get very detailed. If that's not the case however and you have clients, then I am not sure you should be pursuing 100% realism. The reason for that is simple: it's incredibly time consuming. This is more costly than it may sound because, if you're working days and days and days to perfect a piece, you're not spending any time writing new pieces that could help you get better at writing. I must confess I've only very recently made the switch from the (futile) pursuit of realism toward expressiveness instead. Consider that the vast majority of people won't notice all the tiny details that make a performance realistic, but they will be able to tell if there's no expression & heart in the performance. Point being: ask yourself if you're after realism (which is time consuming and the vast majority of people won't care about too much) or if you're after expressiveness (which everyone will notice and, if you're using playable libraries, will be far less time consuming).

#2 What is your skill level as a composer? If you're just starting out, I would actually go for the samples with fewer articulations. That way there's less to worry about and you'll force yourself to be creative with those limited articulations. If you're intermediate-advanced, then the increases in articulations will give you more means to express your musical ideas. In either case though, I should highlight that 4 dynamic layers will get you there 99% of the time. Don't think of 4 dynamic layers as too few. The implementation matters. For example, embertone's herring clarinet only has 2 dynamic layers, but the samples are phase-aligned which makes for such an ultra-smooth transition that you'd never guess it was only 2 dynamic layers.

Best wishes!

 

Read this book if you can. It sheds light on many parts of your question from a world class string quartet.

https://books.google.com.au/books?i...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

The two things are not mutually exclusive. Unless specified, a string player will articulated a phrase in a certain way based on the dynamics.

Sometimes this cause listening to mock-ups to appear like Purple Apples. It, but kinda off.

I am replying as if writing for a real orchestra. However that may not be your goal.