Hello,
I combined instruments into a kit.
Then I realised that this process removes all dynamic symbols.
Why does it happen?
Is there any possibility to prevent it?
before combining instruments into kit:
after combining instruments into kit:
after combining instruments into kit:
1 Like
You will have to (re)add the dynamics for the kit after combining them into a kit, but having the dynamics (hidden) on the original instruments should help with playback.
I think the Team is working on this situation for the future.
It is very inconvenient and strange. I expect that dynamics are not removed by combining instruments.
If you think about it, hopefully you’ll find that this does start to make sense: when you write dynamics for each individual instrument, those dynamics cannot necessarily be combined together in a sensible fashion for the purposes of showing a single set of dynamics when you show the kit using the five-line presentation type. The important thing to know is that the dynamics on the individual instruments are the ones that play back.
So, does that mean I have to add all dynamics twice? Once to “show” and once to “play”?
Yes, effectively so.
If you think about it, hopefully you’ll find that this does start to make sense: when you write dynamics for each individual instrument, those dynamics cannot necessarily be combined together in a sensible fashion for the purposes of showing a single set of dynamics when you show the kit using the five-line presentation type. The important thing to know is that the dynamics on the individual instruments are the ones that play back.
I think the ideal result would be not erasing all dynamics but retaining all dynamics. Removing redundant dynamics is easier than inputting new dynamics.
From various reasons, the formatting layout is the last phase of the work. It is very annoying if changing layout affects the lost of information, because we work twice the same thing.
[An example]
I arranged 11 pieces of Strauss. At the beginning of the work, I separately notated triangle, snare drum, cymbal and bass drum on each own staff. Later I added glockenspiel.
When arranging the layout of the score, I decided to combine
- triangle, snare drum and glockenspiel on a staff and
- cymbal and bass drum on a staff.
After combining, all dynamics are gone.
Probably my work process may be not standard, but readding all dynamics are not ideal.
Perhaps one day Dorico will apply something akin to the Propagate (or the anticipated combine instruments) routine to forward dynamics on individual staves to the combined five-line staff. That way it will be up to the user.
Found this thread now. Just a thought: In some instances, maybe one could copy the dynamics (by filtering) before combining, and paste them back in afterwards? You would probably get some tidying up to do, but nevertheless?
I agree. This would be helpful. Just ran into this issue myself.
1 Like
I really had hoped there would already have some improvement on this topic by now…
I regularly have to redistribute the percussion instruments between players, and losing dynamics every time Ieither combine them into a kit or split a kit into single instruments really is a source of frustration every time. - Especially since the lost information is not visible anywhere after the operation.
5 Likes
I’d like to add my vote as to this being frustrating. I use Virtual Drumline a lot, and the only way I have found a good way of using the program without creating kits in every project is that I import a kit, write for each instrument individually, and then combine later after I have removed all instruments from the kit and put them all on a specific player. The reason I write them separated is because Virtual Drumline sometimes has many playing techniques, so when inputting them via drum pad or key editor, it can get very cluttered. Especially if there were multiple instruments in one kit that have 12+ playing techniques. Unless there is an alternate way of going about this, I’d be all open for suggestions.
1 Like
I’d be interested to hear your suggestions for how to make this more comfortable, Charles. In Sibelius, users had to cope with a crazy number of (identical-looking) noteheads in order to access all of the different playing techniques in VDL, and we wanted to avoid something so totally non-obvious that requires you to remember dozens of notehead numbers in order to access particular techniques. So Dorico at least lays out all the techniques for you in the percussion editor so that you can easily see them, and allows you to cycle through them with Alt+up/down. This seems like a decent compromise to me, but I’m definitely interested to hear your ideas for how to make this easier to handle.
After spending years with Virtual Drumline in Sibelius, I can confidently say that Doricos way of going about it is WAY more intuitive. With Sibelius, I had to look up in the manual which notehead did what, or look within the custom instrument, which killed the flow of things.
My original point I think still stands that if you had the ability to have the written dynamics carry over once combined into a kit, it would be perfectly fine. No need to have all the playing techniques for each instrument be cluttered. You can worry about the engraving after the writing has been done.
Or maybe only show the playing techniques to the instrument that the caret is currently located on the stave? So if you wanted to switch the instrument, you hit the corrsponding arrow to change the instrument in the kit, and those specific playing techniques show? That suggestion might be a bit unintuitive.
In all honesty, I would rather just use my MIDI keyboard for note input for the libraries with a larger aray of playing techniques, but i read a thread that there is a bug currently that is not allowing the use of the “Use percussion map” as a note input option. I have not been able to get this feature to work. Itll audition the note correctly, but not input the correct playing technique in the score for playback. But also, this feature would only work assuming the kit doesnt have instruemtns routed to different channels and have several percussion maps being used. Which reinforces the writting with instruments split and combining later, but have dynamics carry over.
I hope this long messages expresses my thoughts clearly. I feel as this may be an extreme use case and most people would not encounter predicament.
Thanks, Daniel.
Thanks, Charles. I am certainly aware of the problem with auditioning the right sound but either no note or the wrong note being input. It’s in our bug tracker awaiting somebody sitting down to really figure it out – I will try to prioritise this for our next major version if possible.
Thanks, Daniel. Your haste with responses are appreciated!
I am curious as to see if this feature would work if a kit has instruments routed to different channels with different percussion maps. Is that something that could be possible? With this feature, or would it only apply to instruments that use only 1 percussion map?
Once you have individual control over the endpoint (the combination of plug-in or MIDI device, port, and channel) used by a kit instrument, you can also specify the percussion map (and expression map) to be used by that endpoint as well, so it is possible for different instruments in the kit to use different percussion maps.