I have playback techniques with expression maps that use channel changes (plus transpositions). It looks like the channel change does not always reach the VST before the note does, or maybe it does not reach the VST at all in some instances. Below you will find a screen shot of a conga in write mode with four playback techniques(–Natural (Conga Ethnic), Bass tone (Conga Ethnic), Dead stroke (Conga Ethnic) and Slap (Conga Ethnic)–), and also a screen shot of the associated expression map.
What is happening is that the four bass tone notes in the first measure play correctly (I can see them on channel 3 of my ARIA multi VST). Notes 2, 3 and 4 in the second measure play correctly, but the 1st note does not. The channel change does not happen or does not happen in time but the transposition does take place, and that points to a cymbal on channel 1. All four notes play correctly in measure 3.
You’re doing things in a really strange way here with the channel changes in the expression map and should not have to do this. But this has called my attention to what appears to be a regression in Dorico 6 compared to the last release of Dorico 5. It was possible in the final release of Dorico 5 to take any individual instrument within a kit and route it to a different instrument/port/channel than the rest of the instruments in the kit via the Track Inspector in Play mode. That capability is gone for some reason, and I hadn’t noticed prior to this until I went to try to do it.
For me it is a necessary function to be able to route different percussion instruments in a kit to a different VST-instrument/port/channel, so I am surprised this is missing.
That’s a big regression. I hadn’t noticed it because I haven’t done any percussion kits since the upgrade. Nevertheless, changing channels in an expression map for an instrument with a percussion map has never seemed to work (or at least not reliably). It’s been reported - fairly recently if I recall correctly.
Right, but you also shouldn’t have to change channels in an expression map in this way in most circumstances if the controls were there for the individual percussion instruments within a kit to route them to different channels. At least, that would take care of this particular situation. It appears Gregg only turned to the expression map to do this because the controls for the individual tracks are no longer accessible the way they were in Dorico 5.
True, but it’s a convenient way to deal with, say, timpani with different mallets without resorting to creating an entirely new instrument (and routing).
Technically that shouldn’t affect timpani with different mallets becuase that shouldn’t need a percussion map at all, but I get your point, if you substitute any unpitched percussion instrument instead with different mallets, yes you’d want to be able to do that with expression maps.
Although it has always been a bit of a weird separation. From what I recall, the intention was to have percussion maps only and no expression maps for unpitched percussion, and expression maps only for pitched percussion. But percussion maps didn’t include any ability to change the dynamic controller for different articulations (so that rolls/tremolo could use the modwheel for example while regular notes used velocity), so from what I recall it was supposed to be a temporary state of affairs that you had to use both with unpitched percussion to work around this. But this temporary state of affairs seems to have become rather permanent by this time.
I woke up this morning realizing that I may have been misinterpreting what is happening. So I did a search. A note to a percussion kit should be a channel MIDI message, am I right? That means that the channel should be embedded in the message, no way for it to be late. So, if that is true, then Dorico is simply sometimes sending the message on an incorrect channel.
And yes, I would much prefer to route individual percussion instruments, or groups of instruments in a percussion kit, directly to an endpoint that has my desired library.
And thank you everyone for responding. At least I know that I am not alone with this problem and am not going crazy—in this particular instance anyway.
I just ran a quick test. Setting the delay to -1 ms for the Conga/Natural did not change the first note in the second bar from playing incorrectly (as a cymbal on channel 1). However, changing the 4th note in the first bar to an eighth from a quarter did get the second measure to play correctly.
And, just to make things more weird and inconsistent, if I change the last note in the first bar back to a bass tone quarter note, as it was in my original example, all of the notes play correctly.
@fratveno’s suggestion wasn’t referencing the delay setting, but instead the “Expression map switches before notes” setting in the “Playback Options Overrides” section of the expression map. The setting is once per expression map. I don’t think it will help you though.
And again you should not have to do this in this strange way. You’ve had to make multiple duplicates of the “Natural” technique to divide up the instruments and all this is not the normal way of doing this.
If you’re in a rush to get this going, you might be best off installing Dorico 5 alongside Dorico 6 and using that so that you can actually configure and test everything correctly without having to use this weird setup.
What I’m trying next is to set up new percussion kits that match my old kits by adding individual instruments to a single player, setting the endpoints, and then combining them into a percussion kit and moving instruments into position on the five line staff and also setting their note heads. That works in a small test using just three instruments in a kit, but I’m not sure that it will work in my 25, 26 and 15 instrument percussion kits. If it does, I hope moving the music from the current kits will go smoothly. I’ve already imported 18 songs into my project from Finale, with 12 to go. That’s a lot of percussion to move into the new kits.
If it does work, it seems obvious that Dorico should have some method to put a percussion kit into that state, and to be able to go back and forth easily from all instruments set by the parent kit endpoint to individual instruments in a percussion kit being able to have their own endpoint settings. (Not to mention having their own mixers, which is almost mandatory for Garritan libraries where some percussion instruments have volumes so low compared to other instruments that they need to be boosted.)
I don’t think you have to go through all that just as a test. As I said, it is easy to install Dorico 5 without interfering with your Dorico 6 install, and you can easily make a kit in there with two test instruments and go into the track inspector for those instruments and change one to a different midi device/port/channel.
Someone tested and reported that this worked in older Dorico 6 releases so this was just broken pretty recently. But going back to a previous Dorico 6 release would be more disruptive for you since it would involve uninstalling the newer one first, whereas you can install Dorico 5 alongside without any impact on Dorico 6.
Probably you can even open up your old project in Dorico 5, although there is the potential to lose data saved by new features that were added in version 6 if your project uses any of those features.
Also, I should add, it is possible to remove a specific instrument from a kit and I believe it should be “spun out” to its own separate instrument while keeping all of the notes etc., at which point you should have individual controls over that instrument. This might prove a simpler task than trying to copy material across.
I have been trying to understand how Dorico could be sending note messages to a VST using MIDI without the correct channel included. From what I can see, from several sources, every note on/note off message includes the channel in the last four bits of the status byte. This means that there should be no timing issue with changing the channel with respect to the note on/note off message, since every message is directed to a particular channel. Am I right about this?
I can think of two things, off the top of my head, that could be happening. One is that Dorico does not always include the correct channel in a message. Two, Dorico could be calling for a note on for the next note prior to the note off for the previous message. But this doesn’t seem right. If the next note on is on a different channel, it shouldn’t matter if it occurs before the note off for the previous note.
Any thoughts? Anybody out there that knows MIDI well enough to have a better idea of what is going on when Dorico doesn’t send the correct channel in a note on message. Am I missing something? Could it be an ARIA problem? But I think the channel change problem occurs on other VSTs as well.
So it is setting notes on then off at Volume=70 for on and Volume=0 for off.
All of the messages are on channel 3.
Do you have an ARIA player? If you do you could select channel 3 on it and watch the keyboard to see if all of the notes sounding are reflected there. What I saw in my testing was that when I heard the wrong sound, it was not showing up on the channel 3 keyboard. Then I would select the channel 1 keyboard and I could see the note sounding there.
It could be that the problem is not replicating on your setup or that there is some issue with ARIA.
