How can I change the tuning of individual instruments in playback?
What kind of tuning change do you envision?
- Transposing instrument?
- Setting a non-Western scale via Scala settings?
- Micro-tuning?
4th option
Solo instrument 442 Hz, orchestra 440 Hz ?
I’d say it’s a setting you can change in the VST instrument that is playing. I can see why you’d want to have this in the expression map, but it’s not there, as far as I know.
Wha?!! Is this what the OP means? That is a 2 Hz difference. Out of tune beats all over the place. Is this some new bizarre contemporary practice I have never heard of, some attempt to make the instrument sound brighter? I’m sorry, but my mind is boggled at this suggestion.
Could the OP please explain?
I really don’t know 
It was just the first thing I thought it might be the question of the OP. Only when I saw the questions of @Derrek , I realised the OP could mean other things.
Hopefully the OP comes back and explains more in detail.
@KlausWegnerHamilton, as you can see we are confused by your question! Is this for playback only? Is it an alternative tuning for guitar or other stringed instrument? Could you please give us some more detail of what you are trying to achieve!
— Jim
I want to have modern instruments and baroque instruments playing in one ensemble together, whilst keeping to their respective tuning, without notation being affected.
So the baroque instruments would be A=415, and the conventional instruments would be A=440
Would that mean you’d like to have a semitone difference between modern and baroque instruments?
So if you want to hear a A from the modern violin, you will notate a A# for the baroque violin if they have to play unisono ?
Yeah that’s what I want. I want the baroque instruments to sound at A=415, ideally without messing with transpositions settings and so on.
I’m afraid you’ll need to deal with it ! Whenever I had this “problem”, I simply created a version of the instrument in 415Hz (using the Instrument editor), meaning C3 would sound like B2, and Dorico treats it as a transposing instrument. In Concert pitch, you don’t see the transposition, but in Transposed view, Dorico handles the new key signatures and notes accordingly. I don’t think it’s a real “mess”, it’s really as a transposing instrument (which is really the normal stuff in orchestral music — granted, the transposition is not very usual).
You could perform the transposition in the Expression Map.
A Base Switch contains a transposition parameter (half-tone steps).
The violin and many other instruments aren’t fixed pitch like the piano or the organ, thus I doubt that any violinist or singer (baroque or modern) won’t adjust his own pitch hearing what are doing the other instruments. Are you sure this isn’t what we in Italy call “una questione di lana caprina” (a goat wool question)…
Unless it would be a perfectly plausible experiment to understand what the result will be…
I want to write around the effects created by instruments of different tuning playing together