Custom Percussion Kit How To?

Hello community! I am truly getting up to a mastery level with Dorico and I’ve learned to do the vast majority of things in it. However I have hit a wall with this particular issue:

I am aware how to create custom instruments and even percussion instruments also custom playback techniques, Expression maps, etc. But the problem I’m having now is with creating a specific set of 6 unpitched Gongs (If anybody has the VSL Percussion I am referring to what they call China-Gongs).

  • There are 6 Gongs mapped between C4 and A4


  • An 8ve higher one can find the rolls for each one


  • An 8ve above that are the crescendo and decrescendo rolls

So let’s say I create an empty project and add an Empty Kit I am then presented with the Edit Percussion Kit. I then click on the + sign and in the search box I type Gong, which gives me 5 different gongs to choose from. Let’s say I add Gong Ageng and try to edit the name to Gong 6 when I click OK and Apply. Nothing happens… However in the score they appear correct, so moving on. I pick other random gongs or instruments I know I am NOT going to use (e.g. Kempyan) in the score so I can have a total of 6 playable instruments.

In Play I create a new percussion map, but when I try to add the Gong Ageng I find it does not appear in the list??? Neither does the Kempyan…? Am I missing something or is this a bug/oversight? I presume the work around at the moment is to assign it to some other random instrument that I know I won’t be using…?

Thank you as always for any help!

You’re quite right that the instruments from the Gamelan percussion family don’t appear in the dialog that appears when choosing instruments in the Percussion Maps dialog, which is indeed an oversight that I’ll make sure gets corrected in a future version.

In the absence of being able to define your own instrument types, the right approach is indeed to simply choose six distinct instruments so that you can tell them apart easily, rename them as necessary in the score, and make sure that they agree between the kit definition and the percussion map.