I plan on trying to do my orchestral mockups directly in Dorico. The basic idea I had was this:
I have a standard orchestral layout where everything is using Noteperformer. These are basically my “Sketch Tracks”, which I use to quickly try out ideas.
Once I like something, I use the great new filters to unveil my sample libraries and then can start programming my midi from there. I don’t want to use any keyswitching/expression maps, so every articulation will live on its own track.
The instruments would be all hosted on VEPro and disabled by default.
My few experiments I did so far were very promising and I’m really enjoying this kind of workflow. My biggest concern is that in the end I would probably end up with at least 500-600 tracks/players and I’m not sure if Dorico will be able to deal with such a big amount?
Has anyone tried something similar? Since this is quite a big undertaking I don’t want to jump in completely blind.
I don’t think there’s any formal limit to the number of Players you can have; though it has been observed that Dorico does slow down with very large files – though the extent to which this happens can depend on the types of notation objects used, e.g. Cues, Percussion, Slash regions, whether Condensing is on, etc.
I’d really advise you to try – there might be a bit of setup in the first instance, but it would make things a lot simpler, more flexible and avoid repeating work in other projects. At the very least, it would reduce the number of Players to a more usual/manageable number for Dorico.
Since all my samples would be hosted on a decoupled VEPro server, the impact on file size should be almost non-existent, so that is at least promising!
I’ve tried working with expression maps many times (in Cubase), but I never got on with it. For example layering articulations, which I think is an essential technique to get better and more realistic mockups, is not possible with it unless you want to start duplicating tracks in the middle of composing/working. Plus I like to “frankenstein” my articulations together from all sorts of libraries, meaning I might have 20 different articulations for my Violins 1 which come from 9 different sample libraries.
I would say that if you have found something that works for you, that is a cause for celebration.
As far as I know, no one else uses Dorico in this manner, so I hope you will report back on how this works for you as your file sizes grow larger. Just because this is not the typical way Dorico has been designed to be used does not mean that others might not find it useful, and even more folks will be interested in what you discover about possibly new ways to use Dorico.
