In our efforts to capture the most realistic and natural playing, we chromatically sampled the instrument by playing a musical phrase, that naturally contained all the articulations that we needed.  By doing it this way, we got a much truer representation of what “8th notes,” “quarter notes,” and legato transitions actually sound like when someone is playing.  This is because, even though players deeply understand their own technique and what these articulations are supposed to sound like, there are subtle nuances (and imperfections) to the notes when someone is playing a phrase; i.e. a player plays an short note differently if he/she’s just playing isolated short notes, than if they play them in a string of eighth notes.

We also used this recording technique to great effect for our “Accented Legato” script.  We recorded and extracted the appropriate legato transitions from only the particular part of the beat that we wanted, to get a more realistic legato transition that can only happen by recording this way