One of my most common uses is to create rehearsal audio for my choirs. I usually do this by exporting an audio file for each part using a (soprano/alto/tenor/bass) saxophone sound for that part and a piano sound for the rest. It gets kind of tedious to change these back and forth for four to eight vocal parts.
What’s the fastest and most idiomatic way of doing this in Dorico? I figured out how to make a template of sounds in HALion Sonic. Since every piece has different voice parts, I thought maybe it would be easier to set a template with four saxophone sounds and piano and just change the MIDI channel in Dorico. However, I realized from Anthony’s new playback tutorials that I’m not changing the expression maps when I do that, which may or not matter.
I think saving an endpoint configuration where the various voices are mapped to saxophones (or whatever instruments you want to use), with appropriate expression maps chosen, and then building a playback template that uses this endpoint configuration with one of Dorico’s factory “automatic” templates defined as a fallback would be a good plan. You could then use that playback template by default for all future projects.
Personnaly, I am using one instance of VEPRO for each type of instrument, I allocated a single midi channel for each articulation (1:Legato, 2:Long, 3: Short, 4:trem, etc.) and created a single expression map switching from one channel to another one. I loaded different VST patches (of soprano for instance) in the same instance VEPRO instance of a particular instrument and create an automation in VEPRO using CC102,103,… to trigger the solo of the instrument (102:solo patch 1, 103:solo patch 2, etc.). I finally created custom techniques (“Inst 1”,:Inst 2", …) that send data to each Cc10X and using Shiht+P+“Inst 4” for instance to activate the patch 4 in my instance. It’s working nicely and there are no loading time. So I can try various patch on the go and select the one that best fit my musical intention. But it took me hours to program it and need a lot of RAM to upload all my VSTs I have for all the instruments I may use. But so convenient.
So, I would end up with 4 different playback templates for SATB and switch between those before exporting? Would I still change sounds in HALion Sonic or somewhere else?
Ah, I think I misunderstood your original message. What you mean is that you would have the sopranos use sax and ATB use piano, then you’d have the altos use sax and STB use piano, and so on. In that case, yes, you could define four different playback templates for each combination of 1 sax + 3 piano, and apply each one in between exporting your audio tracks.
Yes, that’s what I meant. Thanks! I’ll work on that.