I’m trying to add finger snaps to an SATB choral arrangement and can’t figure it out. I added a second voice to each line and changed the notehead to an ‘x’ but the system recognizes that as a tone so I think I’m approaching this incorrectly. What’s the right way to do this and is it possible have the playback actually play a finger snap sound?
That’s the way to start, but you then need to tweak the playback for voice 2.
In Play mode, set the second voice to a different MIDI channel. Then in the Halion mixer, set that channel to something that will play percussion, e.g. the Stereo GM drum kit.
Finally, you need to “transpose” the pitch of the written note to find a suitable percussion sound. I admit I did that with a bit of trial and error, since I couldn’t find the documentation of exactly what sounds are in each drum kit. Maybe the “body percussion” kit has a better finger snap than what I found…
… you can only attach three files to one post, so here’s the Dorico project.
(Note, I had to tidy up the project after taking the pictures to make it small enough to attach, but at least the pictures show you where to look for what I changed).
Finger snap.zip (1.69 MB)
Thanks Rob. I’ll give it a try. And I hope the Dorico folks who monitor this forum will take note that there’s no intuitive way to add finger snaps, a common enough addition to choral arrangements, at least swingin’ ones!
In nearly three years of “monitoring” this forum, I can count the number of requests for this sort of thing on the fingers of one hand. Does any other notation software give an intuitive way of providing playback for fingersnaps on the stave of a completely different sort of instrument?
I have no idea. How would you handle it so that it both appears correctly in the score and plays adequately in playback mode? Thank you for your help.
Tell us what you think the “correct” notation is. My example was just a guess, but at least it shows you can mix vocal sounds and percussion on one staff.
My solution would be a variation of Rob’s:
Put the finger snaps into a separate voice on the singer’s line, but set it to an empty (or muted) slot in the VST player so the note is silent.
Then create a separate player to produce the actual sound (which avoids having to fuss with percussion mapping, which I find is often a contortion endured only if necessary) and hide (do not include) that staff in the visual scores.