I have over 30 years’ experience of using notation programs, but 0 years experience of VSTs and DAWs, so am finding most elements of Play Mode hard going. I use the wondrous NotePerformer, which needs no technical expertise from me whatsoever, but I’d like to buy Spitfire’s Studio Brass. From what I’ve gleaned from watching Steinberg videos and from reading this forum, I need a expression map - and I can get one thanks to David Tee’s work on this. But it seems I also require a playback template, and this is where I get stuck. I can see that a template is available for Spitfire’s BBCSO, but would it work with Studio Brass? The two VSTs don’t seem to use the same sample player as each other, unless I’ve misunderstood; does that of itself rule out the possibility of using the BBCSO template?
You can make your own playback template. Create a project that contains the instruments you want to be able to use with Studio Brass, and using the Endpoint Setup dialog, assign the appropriate expression map to each of those instruments in the Routing section of the track inspector in Play mode. I don’t know exactly how Studio Brass works, but if it’s like other Spitfire libraries then I imagine you will need to instantiate one player for each instrument in the VST Rack tab of the inspector in Play mode. Make sure that each instrument is routed to the right instance of the Spitfire plug-in in the Routing section of Play mode and that the expression map is assigned correctly in Endpoint Setup, and you’re nearly there.
Now you can save an endpoint configuration for all of the Spitfire plug-ins together, which will pull together the knowledge of which instruments in the score you have assigned to Studio Brass, which expression map to use, and which plug-in to load.
Finally, you take the endpoint configuration and you include that in a playback template, where you will need to define what Dorico should use for everything that isn’t one of these few brass instruments. Presumably you would want to continue using NotePerformer, in which case you would create a new playback template that includes both NotePerformer and your Studio Brass endpoint configuration, with the Studio Brass entry listed before NotePerformer, which establishes the order of preference when Dorico is deciding which sounds to use for each instrument in your project.
Thanks very much for this, Daniel. I had carefully watched one of John Barron’s videos on the way that each element is dependent on the creation of the previous one, but your reply succinctly explains this relationship in a useful cut-out-and-keep way. I really do need to get to grips with the terminology, though.