Cheating volume automation on certain instruments with long sustain?

Dorico
1

I find this issue comes up with me most frequently with stuff like cymbal swells. Some samples have extremely long tails, so after a cymbal swell, I sometimes hear the sustain of the cymbal carrying over for a bar or several bars depending on the tempo. Ideally I’d like to naturally fade it out so it’s not distracting.

I tried automating CC7 but that did nothing, perhaps because it’s worth noting I’m using NP4 with one of the NPPE (Cineperc in today’s case), though I’ve observed this issue in other scenarios. Is there any other way to turn it down?

There are other instances where I wish I could “cheat” volume automation for playback or a mockup, such as where there’s no natural diminuendo on a whole note (held too long at full volume in spite of adding hairpins), or the hairpin curve isn’t giving me what I want. Again in this case automating CC7 isn’t doing anything for me.

And as far as I can tell there is no way to automate actual mixer automation (though not sure if that would make any difference with NP since it runs out of a single channel). Would love to know if there is a way, even if it’s a workaround. Thank you!

2

With NPPE, once can assign different instruments (although probably not individual unpitched percussion from the same sound set) to separate return channels in the Dorico Mixer.

3

Ah, I read though that volumes of the mixer cannot be automated either way?

4

Indeed, you can’t automate the volume faders in the Mixer. But you should be able to influence the dynamics using the Dynamics editor in the Key Editor.

5

Yeah, I tried that first originally, but it doesn’t have any effect on reducing the lengthy sustain of a cymbal swell (after struck), which to be fair does make sense since dynamics seem to affect while playing and not the tail of sound’s open sustain (such as with anything that is struck or plucked). I think the volume itself has to be cheated down but it seems to be not possible unfortunately (for now?!).