One of my hobbies is to take (public domain) classical music scores and put them into Dorico so I can hear what was originally composed, and hear individual instruments to hear how things go together (purely for my own enjoyment, nothing more).
I’m engraving Bach’s 2nd Brandenburg Concerto (BWV Nr. 1047), and I cannot find a trumpet in the Dorico list of instruments that has enough of a high range to play the trumpet notes in measure 15-16, for example (in the first movement). I’m talking about notes in the range D6-F6. The Baroque Trumpet that I started with says it goes that high for advanced players, but the notes do not sound. The other trumpets (and even cornet) don’t play those notes either.
I have done engraving before (I crossed over here from Finale during Dorico 5), but not composition, and haven’t delved into HALion or any of that level of editing. Is that my only option, or am I missing something. I know that I can change the range in the instrument definition so that the notes won’t look out of range. But I would like to be able to hear them.
The “problem” of the Brandenburgisches Konzert Nr. 2 is that’s it’s written for a natural trumpet (no valves!) in F with a tube length between a modern Bb trumpet and a trombone.
To play back this music on contemporary instruments you need a sound library like NotePerformer which is not restricted to the range Dorico specifies in the instrument definitions.
As said, the problem is whether the sample library has notes that high.
HALion’s “GM 057 Trumpet” in the Sonic Selection library plays every note on the keyboard, but it doesn’t sound convincing, particularly for an ‘early’ trumpet.
If you have the Garritan Instruments for Finale, the Trumpet Solo has notes up to F6 (and you can extend the range of ARIA instruments if necessary.)
Other players also let you extend the range of instruments, such as Orchestral Tool’s SINE Player. They have a Baroque Trumpet in their “Miroire” library.
Thank you to all of you - each of you has given me a different piece of the answer. I’m considering the NotePerformer software. I exported to Finale and was able to hear it with the Garritan instruments. I’ll have to do some work to figure out how to import the Garritan instruments into Dorico successfully, but I’ll do more reading and learning and testing to figure that out.
@benwiggy has developed excellent playback templates for Garritan instruments. Just search the forum and you will find them. Then, it should be as simple as applying that template to your score and the GPO instruments will load.
Thank you. I also just downloaded NotePerformer to try it out as well. But I will keep that in mind about @benwiggy, in order to access some of those instruments as well, since I occasionally work with scores that may call for more unusual instruments beyond what Dorico and NotePerformer use.
Thanks again to all of you!
P.S. And yes, @Vadian Bach is out of range - I feel sorry for the poor trumpeter in this piece as just one example!
For the GIFF (Garritan Instruments for Finale) library, you mostly just want the GPO Default expression map, as most of the instruments don’t have any key switches. (A couple of exceptions.)
I haven’t made a playback template for GIFF, as there’s just so many instruments!
Belated welcome to the forum. The typesetting of old scores is a very interesting exercise. It seems like a nice “stress test” to check the abilities of both the sound library and the engraving/typesetting itself. Indeed the Dorico team itself tried this on the Dorico YouTube channel, although using different music.
I might point out that in your example of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, the trumpet actually gets as high as G6 (written D6 for a Trumpet in F). On the complete opposite end, Mozart uses bass clef in one measure for the overture to Don Giovanni (presumably one octave higher, as with horns: Trumpet in D + C2/C3 written = D3/D4 sounding). It seems that the range for trumpet has simply gotten narrower since the 18th century.
My question in relation to the above answers - are all of the above virtual instruments adaptable to these even more extreme notes?
If all VST instruments are extendable; probably not, but for the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 I have used the VSL Studio Historic Winds Natural C trumpet (as there is no F trumpet in. that library). This instrument indeed needs an extension of the range from the highest, probably sampled, note e5 to what on my VSL SY Player keyboard is a G5.
Here the passage in concert pitch (visible are natural trumpet, alto recorder, baroque oboe and solo violin):
Because all the intermediate notes could be played even at the larger intervals of the lower harmonics, the length of the trumpet tube was halved. This also made the instruments more manageable, easier to play and suitable for marching music.
The tonal range was further reduced because, due to the bore, the second harmonic was no longer playable (the lowest note of the second trumpet in the Don Giovanni overture). The then-common notation with an upward-transposing bass clef avoided notating the second harmonic (low C) with four ledger lines.
Edit:
@mavros: NotePerformer plays all notes flawlessly, I changed the transposition of the piccolo trumpet to F to get rid of the red notes.
