First, read the entire manual for ARIA and your Garritan Libraries.  The online manual for GPO5 is kind of tough to read in long form, so I suggest getting your hands on a long form GPO4 manual and reading it from start to finish.  GPO5 is very similar, but with some extra instruments added to the mix (and some minor changes to some of the percussion stuff).  Having a general grasp of how Garritan instruments are organized, and intended to be controlled will be a major player in how you set-up your mock-up projects (regardless of the sequencer/DAW in play).

It's possible to tweak out your human preferences in Finale, and use the MIDI Tool to get better playback from GPO than the defaults.  I find that the default settings for Finale that come with GPO5 have a few issues (mainly with the new Garritan Orchestral Strings), but things can sound much better with some user customization.  Note, such customization can be very piece/passage dependent.  I.E. what works well for a tarantella might not be so good for a classical symphony, or a modern quazi-atonal string concerto, so be aware that more polished mock-ups will often require 'piece by piece, passage by passage' attention, and you'll probably want to fork off your mock-up score off to a new project, as it often comes in handy to use a lot of 'extra staves' to bounce passages around between different variants of your sounds.

One of the easiest to grasp methods inside Finale is in fact, to simply use lots of staves for each virtual player/section.  In this sort of scenario you'd load individual articulations and bow styles instead of using the 'key-switched' variant of a full instrument.  I.E.  You might have four or five variations of arco bowing loaded up in ARIA, where you've gone through and tweaked each sound shaping knob in ARIA's UI for each instrument to emulate things like up/down bowing, portato effects, and so on; and, each articulation would get his own dedicated stave in Finale.  So, when you want subtle articulation and tonal differences, you'd just move your note(s) to the best stave(s) for the job.  The nice thing about this approach is that it is easy to understand, and you won't have to mess with human playback filters, keyswitches, etc. nearly as much.  The catch to using Finale in this way is that visually your score will be a sprawling mess, with individual notes from melodies/harmonies scattered across multiple staves, often surrounded by tons of rests; and, if it's a really big project you might eventually run out of slots and channels for instruments.  None the less, this method can indeed lead to some very convincing mock-ups without digging deep into the human playback properties of Finale.

Personally, I like to use a tracking DAW (Cubase in my case) for audio mock stages of a project.  I just import a MIDI file from Finale and get to work shaping the sound.  The Finale output gives me a good starting point once I’ve duplicated the ARIA (and other plugins I might be using) setup in DAW.

  Here are some of the reasons this works best for me.

1. Robust MIDI Editors, which also include nice Continuous Controller lanes (so you can easily automate all those knobs and switches in ARIA in real time). These usually take the form of a Piano Scroll looking editor, and some DAWs even provide specialized editors more suited to percussion instruments/kits.  This makes it easy to alter the precise velocity and start/stop times of individual notes, while also being able to easily draw continuous controller events into the part (automate the sound shaping parameters of AIRA instruments in real time).
2. Most DAWs will come with an impressive array of effect and sound shaping plugins. While you can load third party plugins into Finale, you will not get nearly as much control over their signal routing, nor will you be able to automate their controls all that well in Finale.  You’ll also find that accumulating quality third party audio processing plugins for Finale can quickly add up to a similar price as getting a good DAW that will include most of the basics, and more.
3. Logic Editors and/or Scripting tools. Imagine you want to add 20% velocity to every note in a range of measures that falls within 50ms of beats 2 and 4.  Next imagine that range of measures is some 20 or 30 bars long.  Without a logic editor, you could go through and alter each individual note by hand, and it might take you half an hour or more!  With a logic editor or script, you could build a quick 'macro' that’ll automate the edit batch style in just a few clicks.  Finale does support a scripting engine, but as far as I know it doesn't include a simple logic editor interface to quickly and easily build simple booleen style edits on the fly as you need them.
4. Precise control over tempo. It’s usually represented with a time-line track, and you can just draw in your tempo changes.  Some DAWs will even let you set ‘cue points’ on a real time line, and then they’ll automatically adjust tempos (according to rules you give it) to match your cue points.  Finale does have some of the best groove templates on the market (for a scoring package), but it's no substitute for YOU being the 'conductor' and forging your own grooves....with human like expressiveness.  Many DAWs also provide interesting 'groove' tools for building and storing quantitation patterns and applying them easily to sections, or even an entire piece.
5. Easy part cloning and humanizing.  One of the simplest tricks to getting better mock-ups is to simply try different sounds, and layer them up!  In a DAW, it's easy to clone tracks and 'non-destructively' try different things (like detuning one slightly, and shifting it's timing off a little)...mute things in and out as needed, etc.  In essence, you can easily build up instrument sections as if they had X number of individual players, all playing with a slightly different 'style and tonal quality' of their own.  While it's possible to do this to some degree in Finale, it's not really designed for it, so it takes several steps to do what you can in a DAW with a few clicks or a single key-combo.
6. Rendering tracks to true audio.  Unless you have a really nice super-computer workstation with fast cores, industrial grade SSD drives, and plenty of memory, if you do large projects with lots of plugin instruments playing, you might eventually run out of CPU power and/or memory.  With a DAW, if this happens you can usually render some of your parts down to pure audio and disable/hide the VSTi track (unless you need them again at some point) and gain enough headroom to keep working.

There’s more, but these six points alone make it worth investing in a good DAW for me.

Which DAW? 

Honestly, unless you can afford to own more than one, take the time to run Demos and see what you think you’ll be most comfortable learning and using.  Even if you must go to a music store to get a peek at some of the ‘dongleware’ stuff that’s not so easy to just grab a free demo, it’s a good idea to get a live demo or TRY THEM PERSONALLY where possible.  I think the main thing to be aware of, is that some DAWs have more focus on live audio recording/mixing, while others are more aimed at running virtual instruments; meanwhile, there are a few DAWs that try to be ‘all in one’ solutions.  Learn the differences, and narrow your choices to DAWs in your price range that have the best MIDI Editors.

Expressing Ideas

On this front, ask specific questions and someone might just be able to offer a few options.

Just as an example:

Question:  Why do the fast runs in my violin solo sound so bad?  I've turned the volume all the way up for the stave, and put ffff dynamics on the passage, but all the notes just are NOT coming through!

Answer:  Try using the Garritan Orchestral String (GOS) Solo Violin.  Send a CC119, 127 event to the instrument.  This will start the sample playing later in the bow attack.  CC119 can be used to change where the sample starts playing.  Smaller values give more of the sample's attack phase, while larger values (up to 127) start later in the sample (cutting out several ms of the attack phase), so it begins where there should be more amplitude in the sample (as well as vibrato inducing finger motion).  CC119, for me at least, is essential to understand and use judiciously in getting good results with the new GOS Solo and Section strings.

Thanks Jerrod,

Most importantly...play Piano and compose :)  Try not to get too distracted, and don't forget that many audiences aren't going to be super picky as long as it sounds fairly pleasing...so keep that in mind.  I.E.  Doing a piece for your local church that uses some simple background strings vs trying to mock up a symphonic piece for movie or video game that's supposed to convince people (starting with pro musicians who are also looking at music by competing producers) it's a 'real orchestra'.

Each instrument of an orchestra takes a life time of practicing so it stands to reason that figuring out ways to get a realistic rendition of a piece using little samples all spiced together with the sorts of expressions and techniques a human player uses would also take good bit of studying, practicing, and trying different approaches.  Pro audio in itself can also take a lifetime of experience and practice to master, as well as a different sort of ear training.

Unless you find pro audio super interesting, and that you 'enjoy' digging deeply into the intrinsic nature of electronic instruments and pro audio, while also researching the principals of how all the instruments work and get played throughout the ages, it's OK to simply focus on making great scores intended for humans to interpret and play.  You can always get more experienced help from others when it comes time to produce mock ups, or get real musicians to record it.

The good news is that with each project you'll learn a little something new :)  One project at a time......so keep making those scores and let mastery of the instruments for playback grow with you over time :)

DAW? Reaper dude:

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=190390

Fully functional demo version...$60 for personal use. Cannot beat it with a drum stick! Great FX, terrific community/forum, great developers!

And if you want to add a cheap, small (but IMHO) essential string library to GPO 5, then pick this up for a song ($15)...realistic spicatto/staccato like nobody's business:

http://simplesamsamples.com/virtual-instruments/signor-paganini-solo-violin.html

Enjoy!

Dean,

I'd recommend getting your hands on the GPO4 Owner's Manual in pdf to start with.  Why?  It's easy to just read the thing from cover to cover in long-form so you can get a sense of how the instruments are organized and controlled (cognitive structured learning). 

GPO5 will be quite similar, but with more instruments.   The GPO5 manual is in an online format that's kind of hard to just read from start to finish (constructivist style presentation).  The problem with the new manual is sometimes you just don't know what questions to ask in the first place, so you can miss out on a lot of potential.  In contrast, reading a long-form manual like the one with GPO4 provides a lot of grounding information that you might never think to 'search for' on your own.

Next, if possible, hook up a MIDI controller and just PLAY the instrument.  Work the mod wheel, tweak the knobs, and spend some time getting to know every instrument.  They all have unique qualities, relative strong and weak areas, etc, and it's good to get to know it....just like you'd get to know individual humans in an orchestra that you conduct on a regular basis.  Just because some instrument is named Trumpet 1, that doesn't mean you might not prefer to use Trumpet 3 on first part for a given passage, etc.

When it comes to building techniques and such in Finale, simply play lots of scores through the thing and pay attention what it is doing.  Take note of when it sounds good, vs when it doesn't seem to sound right.  Trace the techniques in human playback and disable the ones that don't sound right, and replace them with more suitable techniques.  I.E.  Out of the box, I was unhappy with the way tenuto notes kept triggering a portamento sound that just didn't work.....so I traced that technique and disabled it, then built up my own tenuto settings.

For the legacy strings, you can get pretty good results with little more than CC1 (which Finale does a good job with on its own), and key velocity (again Finale is pretty good at automatically getting you in the ball park on key velocity as well).

The new Orchestral Strings provide some extra bow styles/articulations, but it's almost impossible for a sound-set designer to provide a decent 'out of the box' set of techniques that are going to work with every score.  Just as an example....there are times when a staccato note in quaver (under a slur) should be martele, other times this should be sautile, or even spiccato or staccato.  Every other score is going to have different requirments....and it'll be up to you to help Finale make good choices with the new GOS strings.

Keyboards, Percussion, Winds and Brass, and the Legacy Strings are pretty simple....I don't think you'll have much trouble mastering those.  The new Orchestral Strings have a good bit of potential, but you'll need to spend some time learning how to tweak ADSR (Attack Delay Sustain Release) and the CC119 Offset on the fly to really make it sing.  Different scores will have different needs (styles and tempos).

As for manipulating CC events in Finale....

You've got more than one option really.  You can store up your most commonly used settings as techniques in the human playback area of Finale.  I.E.  You might have an auto interpreting technique applied to the up-bow mark....that adjusts ADSR on a regular arco instrument so the attack is a bit weaker than normal.  I.E.  You could set it so slur marks apply the CC68 legato switch.....so a tenuto increases the release time a little, and so forth.

Next, you get a MIDI tool, where you can more or less paint CC events onto a rudimentary graph.

Next, you can also hard code CC events to a given score marking or text pattern.  This is kind of similar to techniques in human playback in terms of how you set it up, BUT, it's different because this is somewhat independent of the automatic interpretive engine (No way to designate exclusion groups and such as that).  This method can really come in handy for things like mutes vs open, or working virtual organ consoles and harp pedals.

Finally, you can just use lots of staves, tweak sounds directly in ARIA itself in the instrument control panels, and put your music on the best stave for the job as needed.  This last method isn't very good for printing purposes, but if getting a nice mock-up is your goal, it can be a very effective and simple way to get a wide variety of bowing styles, timbers, attacks, releases, etc....without pulling your hair out trying to get human-playback to properly interpret your intentions.

The most important thing is that you compose and make scores!  The nuances and details of making realistic mock-ups simply take practice and experience.  If you have scores to share (or at least share portions with specific examples of what you're trying to get sound-wise) folks out here in the community can take a peek and help you find ways to get closer to what you're shooting for.  The more specific the question (and a score excerpt we can load will help) the more likely one of us can help you find a solution.

With the new Orchestral Strings...the tutti strings especially....

Send CC119,127 and then try.  Legato Switch can also help in fast passages that need feel closer to the beat.  Changing the CC119 offset is about the only way I can use the tutti strings in many scores.  Eventually I'm going to dig into the sfz file and learn more about these samples and do more of my own key-switches to get more offset options.  Meanwhile, I mostly use the 127 offset and then use attack settings if I need more of a ramped attack.

For the legacy strings, if you need less of a ramped bow attack, increase key velocity, and possibly even engage the Legato switch (CC68 or notation versions, or CC64 for Standard).

Hi Brian,
My head feels like it is about to explode with all the information you provided. If I'm being honest, your post was far more than I was anticipating, so thank you for the time and thought you put into it! This has definitely helped me streamline my thoughts a bit. Still a lot to think about, but it gives me some starting points. I've been humbled in the last few days as I have become to realize how intensive Garritan, Finale, and any subsequent programs really are. I knew they had substance, but I'm amazed at HOW MUCH substance.
Thanks again for your thoughts and suggestions!

Reaper is great. Much helpful info in this post. 

Brian, if you were starting from nothing as a pro Finale user, but one unfamiliar with GPO 5, where is the best place to start to study up on and learn about what and how various CC works? Also other MIDI functions that I use, which I am just starting to understand. Attempting to learn about CC in particular. 

Thanks for your detailed response. The online manual for the GPO 5 actually seems really well organized and is relatively easy to go through, but it also seems only skin deep in certain areas. The orchestral strings are causing problems and "regular" collection (is that you mean by "legacy" in this case?) isn't a great fit for some contexts. I have done plenty of know twisting under the hood at this point. For example with the strings, the attacks of the long bow, lush, etc. sounds seem to come after the beat, and changing that is a major issue if you need to use that sound. I can see how trying out sounds on a MIDI controller could help. It's days and days of work to do it well with over 500 instruments. But your comment gives me some ideas. My particular issue right now is the violin/string sections, which is why I asked about CC. I did a lot of knob-twisting in the controls settings and still couldn't get what I wanted from them.

Right, this goes back to my original question about what "CC" is and how to learn how use it (as specifically as possible in a tutorial) in Finale to help me control and sculpt with these settings. That is what my question was about – especially with the string sections, as a client of mine is married to playback in Finale and we need as good a sound as we can get. I should add that East West and VS libraries are out of budget and that the cloud East West package, while great, in some cases doesn't meet the specifications I need for my laptop, which is older but Pro (Macbook Pro).

The delayed attack that ramps into the notes doesn't work for him when accompanying a piano in doublings. He also seems to love pure, clean tones without much reverb that are far too clean for my ears to sound as realistic as a real orchestra – but I'm not the boss in those cases. It mostly comes from him working on a keyboard and having that sound influence what he wants to hear while at the same time expecting exceptional sounds that can supercede it, but to his ears. He's an amateur, local musician and not a professional composer so this approach has challenges. I work internationally as a composer and can confirm that his take on what he hears is innaccurate much of the time (but accurate in others). We work in person, so I am challenged to get this stuff right on the spot!

I'm fairly adept at using the MIDI tool on Finale to get things done in terms of tweaking key velocities, durations, etc. under the hood for playback in documents and also with working with Expressions. 

If you know of a good article/s and/or tutorials/online, or even to purchase, please let me know. I'm also potentially interested in other, affordable string libraries. They don't have to be exceptional, but they may match the idea this client, who is a major client of mine, has in his head. But Garritan should work if we get it right, he and I are both confident we can get something usable. I hope that happens! 

I've found now that the Finale user manual helps a great deal.

I can appreciate what you're asking for, but there are so many reasons such tutorials don't exist for Finale and GPO5. Most notably, the GPO5 update is less than a year old.  Some aspects of the newer content aren't well understood or practiced out in the wild just yet.

Another reason is that people are getting more and more conditioned to constructivist learning styles, which don't see a need for prerequisite knowledge or 'scaffold cognitive' structuring of information.  The problem with this, is you don't know to search for things in the documentation if you don't start with the big picture.  Constructivst style documentation is well organized and easy to search, but that doesn't do you a bit of good if you don't know what to search for (terminology, concepts, etc.).  It's like going fishing with your bare hands and not knowing that you've actually got impressive nets at your disposal.

Example:  If you read the long form of the GPO4 manual, and still don't understand that each control in an ARIA Instrument can be automated via CC Event, then you'll need to go all the way back to the late 1980s and read some MIDI primers.  As for what all those dials and controls in ARIA can do to a sound, your own ears are the best judge.

Finale itself is going to be a similar ordeal.  Scan/Reading the entire manual from cover to cover will give that 'cognitive foundation' to have an idea of how to 'search' and 'practice'.

As for really digging into Finale's Playback engine beyond getting a basic playback quality that is fairly pleasing to my ear so I can sit here and compose for hours at a time without getting a splitting headache...for me, It's just so much easier to export a score as MIDI, and shape it up in a tracking DAW when I get ready to attempt a more polished/detailed/realistic sounding mix-down.  In this case, you just draw the stuff you need on controller lanes as dots, lines, and curves.  If you've got a client that must have this play back in finale, import it back into Finale after the touch-ups as a new set of staves which you can hide from view in page mode, while muting or directing the 'printed/viewed' staves to dummy channels.  Or even simpler, pull in a fully rendered stereo audio track.

Engraving scores is an ever evolving artform, with quite a learning curve, and that's what Finale is really designed to do well.  Electronic mock-ups through pro-audio tools are also an ever evolving artform, often with problems that need solutions that just don't cooperate so well with traditional forms of notation. 

While there is a lot of potential in the Finale Playback Engine to shape sounds and get good playback quality, it's not the sort of thing you're going to master with a tutorial or two.  It's going to come in small chunks with each new project you put together.  Out of the box, Finale should already be good enough for most people to communicate ideas....but as a mock-up production tool....it's a long way from being the easiest set of tools out there to 'shape actual sounds' with.

If you have a score you'd like me to look at, and put a few examples in, drop me an email at roland_brian@hotmail.com and I'll take a peek when I get some time.

I do realize that there are some puzzling aspects to how strings act in Finale since GPO5 came out.  There are some errors in how those techniques were put together, and default settings for some of the instruments out of the box were not well thought out (in defense of MM, if they tried to get it perfect, we'd be on 10 year cycles of getting ANY updates/upgrades at all).  The user can indeed fix them....but I think the cause is kind of hopeless without at least reading the GPO4 manual in long form, chapter by chapter, from beginning to end, IN SEQUENCE.  The GPO5 manual has all the same information plus some....but it's not in page order, and you'll miss more than 90% of the 'concepts' that Garry Garritan had in mind when he designed the stuff if you just pop on there and type in, "How do I?" and hope you click a useful link.

Understanding how the libraries are organized and intended to be controlled is a perquisite to digging into Finale's playback engine and getting more control over how it plays the instruments.  It's an ever growing cognitive scaffold.  Get the foundational information (it doesn't have to be totally understood on a first quick scan reading of the manuals, just do it so you'll be somewhat familiar with possibilities), and your mind will come up with the experiments and tutorials on its own :)

Here is a thread that might help sort out how to get a tighter and more responsive sound from the new GOS strings.

https://makemusic.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000842467-GPO-5-String-KS-not-working?page=1#community_comment_115003728328

As of May 11, 1017 I started a thread offering my personal alternative Human Playback Techniques for Finale.  It comes attached to a Schubert Scherzo for strings.

https://makemusic.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115007755108-My-Finale-GPO-Soundset

One nice thing about this profile is that it allows mixing and matching the Legacy GPO strings with the new GOS strings without as many annoying conflicts between the two.  It also makes a few choices quite differently from what the defaults were doing.  Take a close look at them, and by all means change them up and to things to suite your own needs.

dear Brian, 

when you say "...

1. Robust MIDI Editors, which also include nice Continuous Controller lanes (so you can easily automate all those knobs and switches in ARIA in real time). These usually take the form of a Piano Scroll looking editor, and some DAWs even provide specialized editors more suited to percussion instruments/kits.  This makes it easy to alter the precise velocity and start/stop times of individual notes, while also being able to easily draw continuous controller events into the part (automate the sound shaping parameters of AIRA instruments in real time)..."

you mean also linked to a physical controller?

could you please be more explicit?

TIA

Alessandro,

Yes, you could record physical MIDI controller movements and play them back, but you can also enter the events on a time line with your mouse and computer keyboard.  Note the example of the Cubase "Key Editor" below.  As you can see one can create 'controller lanes' to make all sorts of automated adjustments to ARIA instruments.

When you look at the "Controls" tab of an ARIA instrument hovering over the mixer on the left, notice the little CC and number over some of the knobs.  That tells you what CC can automate the control.  Garritan libraries usually use CC1 for dynamics control (winds, brass, and strings).  There are also various pedal events (Sustain CC64, and Legato CC68).

In the top right screen shot above, you can see a Solo Violin part in a piano roll type editor.  The advantage to this 'time line' type of graphical editor is that you have very precise control over exactly when in 'time' a note begins and ends.  You can also see several controller lanes stacked under the piano scroll.  Velocity bars for each note signify how fast/hard a key is struck on a MIDI keyboard (or how fast the air is on a breath controller).  Under the velocity lane, you can see a bunch of CC lanes that I want to use with the GPO5 Solo Violin.

CC1 is for the general dynamics over time.

CC68 (legato) is engaged for slurred or trilled passages.

CC70 - 75 automate the Attack, Sustain, Delay, and Release controls shown in the ARIA control panel.

CC119 controls the sample offset for this particular violin instrument (variance on how the bow attacks).

Again, we can have very precise control over where these controller events go on the timeline.  I can work with metered/tempo scales, or with actual linear time frames (seconds, milliseconds, etc, or by frames if syncing to film/video).  I get line and curve tools to make it easy to draw, move, scale, copy/paste all these controller events (including booleen logical editing).  I can also choose to record the events live using the faders/pots/breath sensors/etc. of a MIDI controller.

 When I start this sequence playing, the knobs and mod wheel in ARIA bounce all over the place in response to the events I draw in the CC lanes.

There's a whole bunch more in terms of shaping the sound one can get into with this sort of DAW.  We can load that mixer down with all sorts of audio effects.  Reverb, Chorus, EQ, Dynamic Compressors, notch filters, stereo enhancers, and more.  The controls of all the VST effects can be automated.  We can also do subtle touches to the over all 'mix' after having roughed it in in the sequenced tracks (either by working the controls in real time, or again, by drawing events and curves in special mixer automation lanes).  Most everything in pro level tracking DAWs can optionally be 'remote controlled' using MIDI controllers, tablet apps, etc.

There are all kinds of power tools to make it easy to clone and stack tracks (layer and create sections of your own, and easily bounce around among them), divert their output to more than one instrument, remap/transform things, and the list goes on.  One has precise control over the tempo at all times.  CuBase also has a lot of tool for song writers...things like chord tracks, groove management, quantization, expression maps for some degree of automated score interpretation, arranger tracks, tools to manage tempo and hit 'cue points', etc.  Then there are all the audio track specific things (sample editing, time stretching, sample re-tuning, etc.).

I need to study your answer... thanks!

Is that Cubase?

Alessandro,

Yes, those screen shots are from CuBase 9.5 Pro.  When composing and working with virtual instruments I really like it, as it has superb MIDI editors (Key, Score, In-Place, Event List, Diamond Drum Mapper), a good score entry mode with definable expression maps for composing with traditional notation, and a quality set of vst plugin effects right out of the box.  Obviously you have many choices besides just CuBase, in a wide range of price brackets and feature sets, so I do recommend shopping around and trying Demos. 

Most tracking DAWs are going to give you in the least a good Piano Scroll type editor with some form of CC lane.

To me the few 'bad things' about CuBase as it stacks with the competition are:

1.  Requires a USB dongle (standard size).  This can be a pain if you intend on running the DAW on modern mobile systems (laptops or high end tablets/convertibles, as many of the newer models don't have many or any USB ports, or only have mini ports that will require extra adapters and such).

2.  It's not the most efficient DAW out there in terms of maximizing system resources.  There are DAWs that run much leaner, and allow you to work with more tracks before hitting a wall where you need to start rendering things to pure audio to free up system resources.  With Garritan the track count is pretty high with CuBase (even of modest hardware), but if you intend to use a lot of really processor intensive plugins on really large projects you'll want a high end machine that is built and optimized to work with CuBase.

Personally I run CuBase Pro on a very modest system and it easily meets my needs.  I just wanted to point out that maximizing system resources isn't the CuBase forte.  It's a loaded DAW, so it likes to chew up system resources.

3.  Because it is a DAW that tries to do 'everything' well (the Pro version), it's not exactly cheap.

As for the good things about CuBase Pro there are really far too many for me to try to list here but I'll go with some of my favorites.

1.  Run it on PC or Mac.  You get access to BOTH versions.

2.  When you buy the latest version of CuBase, you can easily roll back to almost any previous version of CuBase ever released.  This can come in handy if you still have older machines running older OSes, or in the rare event you need to work with older projects that don't want to cooperate with the newest releases (rare, but possible).

3.  Great tools for composing and editing MIDI and automating Virtual Instruments.

4.  Legacy support is probably the best in the industry.  I still use a lot of external equipment (keyboards, synths, etc.) and CuBase is really good at maximizing their potential.

5.  The remote controller system in CuBase is fully user configurable.  It has easy to understand xml editors built into the application, so it's easy to bind MIDI remote controls (to nearly every command/control in the DAW) for your own needs to your heart's content.  Thanks to this I can do step entry style composing into the score-style editor directly from my MIDI Keyboard, and I rarely have to touch the mouse or computer keyboard when entering a part.

6.  Tools for doing real time recording of a playing performance are top notch.

7.  The included plugins and instruments are quality stuff.  You can do good work and learn a ton before ever needing to get out the wallet and invest in third party plugins.

8.  When working with percussion tracks/staves, I've yet to find a better system in any DAW for mapping drum staves, editing the performance data on a percussion track, and mixing and matching percussion plugins or external drum machines.

9.  Very good at syncing to video.  If you need game engine stuff, and more post-production tools, Steinberg's Nuendo is the next step up, and your CuBase projects load right in.

10.  CuBase takes CC management a step further with the new VST3 protocol.  It adds something called 'note expression'.  This allows one to attach controller events directly to individual notes, as opposed to keeping them free floating on controller lanes. 

One can elect to simply 'double click' a note and draw in the controller information that way if desired, or he can easily convert the CC lanes back and forth between note expression and free floating events.  In contrast, traditional CC lanes keep events free floating on the time-line somewhat independently of the note on/off events.  This ability to bind expressive control to individual notes is desirable if one wishes to quantize, apply grooves, cut/paste passages, etc. 

I.E.  Note expression is attached to the note, so if you move/remove the note then all that controller data goes with it.  If you're using a VST3 plugin that supports full note-expression, then you can even apply tone altering characteristics to every individual note (CC events are channel based...NE can drive individual notes independently).  To date, CuBase is the only DAW I know of with a full implementation supporting VST3 note expression.

9.  Imports and exports XML scores, MIDI files, and others.  This makes it possible to port projects between CuBase, Finale, Sibelius, MuseScore, Dorico, etc.  It'll require some work to get scores to match up with the target platforms, but it's functional, and time saving.

There's more of course, but those are some of the more obvious reasons I really like CuBase for doing 'mock-up' work with Virtual Instrument libraries like Garritan.

Brian - where did you find this information - 

"Answer:  Try using the Garritan Orchestral String (GOS) Solo Violin.  Send a CC119, 127 event to the instrument.  This will start the sample playing later in the bow attack.  CC119 can be used to change where the sample starts playing.  Smaller values give more of the sample's attack phase, while larger values (up to 127) start later in the sample (cutting out several ms of the attack phase), so it begins where there should be more amplitude in the sample (as well as vibrato inducing finger motion).  CC119, for me at least, is essential to understand and use judiciously in getting good results with the new GOS Solo and Section strings."

This is a godsend. How the heck did you find this?

Not in the GPO4 manual... 

Jonathan,

I found it by examining the SFZ files.  There's an opcode in the notation version of the newer Orchestral String instruments that assigns CC119 to modulate the sample offset.