I have not been able to assign percussive tapping sounds to a string section. I tried creating a second instrument but did not succeed.
Thanks for any help
What do you mean exactly? If your VST of choice supports it then you can assign a playing technique like ‘col legno’ , or ‘col legno buttato’, or a Bartok pizz, etc.
The players are to tap with the pads of their fingers.
Andrew Hugill recommends notating this with x-noteheads. As far as getting those noteheads to sound like tapping, you would need to have a VST that includes that sound. I’m unclear if a percussion instrument can be used to achieve this sound other than having a hidden staff with the requisite percussion sounding at the same time interval as the violin and suppressing the natural sound of the violin.The Orchestra: A User's Manual - Violin Extended Techniques
Proof of concept:
ProofOfConcept.dorico (503.3 KB)
This is pretty trivial to achieve in Play mode, without even doing anything specific with expression maps etc. as long as you have some kind of sampler instrument where you can assign a suitable percussive sound to be triggered (if it’s a basic sampler patch, maybe just a same sample mapped across the keyboard so it makes no difference what pitch it’s notated at in Dorico).
In this example, the regular arco playing is basic Up-Stem Voice 1, and I put the X noteheads in Up-Stem Voice 3, and enabled “Independent Voice Playback” in Play mode:
In Play mode, it looks like this (Omnisphere instance with a basically randomly selected perc patch was added in the VST and MIDI “rack”):
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I wouldn’t necessarily recommend buying specifically Omnisphere for this purpose. I just happened to have it around and I knew that quickly filtering from the thousands of patches I could quickly find something nondescript percussive stuff to test this out.
Any sampler (paid or free) can be used for this purpose, and also the Groove Agent SE included with Dorico makes it trivially easy to drag and drop any suitable sample files (that resemble “tap on instrument”) and assign them throughout the full key range. If different areas of the instrument are needed (different staff position), they’re possible to map as well for different samples, such as “body/side” etc.
That’s good to know. Thanks.
I noticed with Omnisphere one could sample audio - presumably of someone tapping on a violin. Can Groove Agent SE do that as well?
Also throwing this in the ring, there is a lovely library by Westwood Instruments called Percussion Untamed which are all literally percussive techniques played on individual string instruments, for the most authentic sound. And it’s affordable! 
I haven’t gotten around to creating maps for it but I might do so in the next year if anyone is interested.
Thanks everybody. I actually use Dorico for the engraving, I don’t do much with VST and midi. I have notated with x noteheads, I just wondered if I could give the string players a second percussion instrument to switch to. anyhow I will just stick with my x’s.
You can only add instruments to a solo player. Strings are usually section players (hence cannot hold additional instruments).
However, you could change your string players to soloists if you do not need to use the divisi feature…
Presumably even section players could use independent voices in Play to allow for a percussive sound to be added manually to the string part.
Yes. That option was detailed earlier in the thread.