creating a piccolo trill

There's no single way to play a trill, and how it's performed depends on the meter, the tempo, and the style of music (baroque trills start differently than classical trills).

You can attempt to program a trill by inputing a string of 16ths, 16th triplets, 32nds, or 32nd triplets and change every other note in the matrix/score/event editor and create a trill-like effect, but guaranteed it's going to sound horribly mechanical regardless of how much tweaking you do to it. Trills are rarely performed metrically perfect. There's a fair amount of leeway with the timing. Sometimes a trill starts as approx 32nd notes but ends up being a nontuplet (group of nine notes) towards the end.

If you attempt this, you don't want to use a monophonic sound. You want there to be at least two voices which overlap ever so slightly. Release time of the sampler plug (or synth or whatever) will have a significant effect, where you need to split the difference between too "tight" and too "washy".

Don't know what to advise other than attempting what I described above. Better off either playing in the trill yourself to at least get some feel into the part, or, finding some appropriate trill samples.

One thing I've tried quite successfully is to program trills using pitch bend events. This involves ensuring the patch you're using has a pitch bend value set to the amount you want to trill (i.e. normally a tone or a semitone)and then entering appropriate pitchbend events into either the event list or hyper edit page i.e. only using the values 0, 64 or 127 and avoiding the 'in between' ones ... this effectively allows for the 'slurred' pitch changes of a trill without retriggering the sample - works well with woodwind and solo string sounds.

If you think about it, if a cellist or flautist was to play a trill, they would either use one bow stroke or one tongued note to play the whole trill (long trills requiring more than one bow or breath excepted!) and finger the trill during that sustained note.

Sounds fiddly I know and it's quite difficult to explain but hope this makes sense and gives someone something to experiment with ... particularly if you don't have trill samples.

Cheers

Rob S

It is sampled that way. VSL comes with 5 different trill variations (plus 5 more with release trigger) for the Piccolo flute.