I am creating an arrangement for Orff ensemble: Bass, alto and soprano xylophones, hand claps, patsch and stomp, triangle, soprano recorder, and voice.
The bass xylophone and the patsch and stomp have no playback sounds. I went into play mode to try to figure it out on my own and was quickly frustrated. I then referred to the documentation, and got no helpful information. I don’t feel like I’m any closer to figuring out how to make the sounds I’m looking for actually play during playback. I have Dorico 5 Pro, and as far as I know I have all of the updated sound libraries.
When I do a search in Dorico Help for [change instrument sound], none of the results appear relevant. While I do want to eventually figure out how to make my instruments sound, I would even more like for the documentation to be able to lead me to the solution in a straightforward manner. I’m not sure if I have some particular mental block around this task, but I am just not finding what I need.
The following link from the manual describes how to access the VST instrument window.
Disregard this from the original post:
(Halion Sonic SE (a VST instrument), although a Steinberg product, is a separate beast altogether. The manual for it: Operation Manual)
HALion Sonic SE has been discontinued and Dorico now uses HALion Sonic rather than HALion Sonic SE, so if you want to look at the documentation for HALion Sonic, you’ll find it here:
As for changing the sound for an instrument, this is something that is accomplished in Play mode. If you want to use a different VST instrument altogether, the first step is to load that VST instrument using the VST & MIDI panel. Once you have the VST instrument you want to use in the rack (either because it’s already there, or because you’ve just added it), you then switch to the Track Inspector panel. Select the track corresponding to the instrument whose sound you want to change in the track overview on the right-hand side in Play mode, then choose the desired VST instrument from the first menu in the Routing section of the panel. Adjust the channel if necessary (e.g. because the sound you want to use is loaded in a different slot in the VST instrument).
One more thing to make sure of: if you change the sound used by an existing instrument, you may well also need to change the expression map chosen for that endpoint, which you do in the Endpoint Setup dialog.
I appreciate your support, @dspreadbury. However, I am feeling like there is some large chasm between information that has been assimilated over years by the support team and information that needs to be available to people just signing up with Dorico.
Your instructions seem very thorough, but I am having a hard time trying to implement them. For example you say:
" the first step is to load that VST instrument using the VST & MIDI panel."
When I go into Play Mode and click on the VST and MIDI tab, I see a single entry:
02 - HALion Sonic
that seems to apply to all instruments. If I select individual instruments in the right-hand column that contains the instruments, nothing changes in the VST Instruments dialog. I see no way of changing individual instrument settings.
I feel that there needs to be documentation, either video or textual, that walks through this process step-by-step. Maybe my neurotype is making it difficult for me to follow the instructions as offered, but I am still lost.
This idiom is used throughout Dorico for adding things, so I assumed it would be clear that this is what you needed to do – apologies. Think of adding a VST instrument as being a bit like adding a player in Setup mode: when you add a player, they start empty-handed until you assign an instrument to them. This is the same: you first add an empty entry to the rack, and then assign a VST instrument to that empty slot.
You haven’t said whether you want to use different sounds included in Dorico’s built-in library or a totally different VST instrument. If you want to use different sounds provided with Dorico rather than a whole new instrument, you don’t need to add a new instrument to the VST and MIDI panel.
Instead, you select the track corresponding to the instrument whose sound you want to change in the track overview in Play mode, then in the Track Inspector panel, you click the little e button in the Routing section, circled in the picture below:
That will open the user interface for the VST instrument, at which point you can find the channel in the VST instrument that corresponds to the sound you want to change, and load a new sound into that channel. Don’t forget to check the expression map chosen in Endpoint Setup after changing the sound in the VST instrument.
I’ve just realised that of course I’m using a development build here this morning, and my Track Inspector contains an extra drop-down that Dorico 5.0.20 does not: the Ex. map drop-down shown in the second picture in my post above won’t appear in your version of Dorico. That drop-down will be added in Dorico 5.1 and will allow you to adjust the expression map used for an endpoint without going into Endpoint Setup, but for now you will need to go into Endpoint Setup.
Thanks again, @dspreadbury, but I’m still having a hard time following. I don’t know at what moment I need to add an instrument. I’m thinking that the instrument exists and I need to modify it so that it plays back. Remember, I created a score using the dialogs presented.
I created an Orff ensemble using an Empty template. That was all fine and dandy–the creation process was great! But then, after creating the score and inputting notes in all of the parts, I found that many of the parts do not play back at all. I feel that the documentation needs to walk me through the process that begins in the moment when I try to play back a score that I created using the tools that were presented and there are no sounds.
I’m surprised that having created new players and instruments, Dorico hasn’t managed to choose sounds for them. Perhaps the real issue here is that Dorico is having problems loading sounds more generally.
Can you attach the project itself here? If you don’t want to share the project, you can delete all the music from it, leaving just the instruments and players you’ve created – that should be sufficient for me to diagnose what’s actually going on.
When I load a patsch sound, I hear a drum rather than a thigh-slap; but I do hear a sound. (Not sure any standard sound set would contain the sound of a thigh-slap.)
Interesting. It appears there are no Halion sounds defined for Orff> Patsch and Stomp.
If I create an empty project and add just those instruments, no instance of Halion is loaded, whereas NotePerformer does at least load a drum sound for each.
I went ahead and reinstalled all of the sound libraries, but there was no change. That being said, I was able to change all of the xylophone instruments to [GM 014 xylophone] and playback is now correct. I’m still fumbling along trying to figure out how to create sounds for patsch and stomp.
How would I go about assigning sounds to those instruments?
Edit: I was able to assign patsch and stomp to HALion, but I don’t see where the granular control is to change these sounds. It seems that Hand claps, Patsch, and Stomp are assigned [GM 129 ] Stereo GM Kit. I now get drum sounds for Patsch and Stomp, but would like to change them to a different percussion instrument.
Unpitched percussion instruments are frequently combined and assigned to individual MIDI notes of a single percussion sound set. To discover which sound goes with which pitch (particularly for less common sounds) one has to find the instruction manual (if available) or experiment and guess. Granted, it is no picnic finding some sounds.
I don’t think there are good approximations for patsch and stomp in any of the percussion kits that are supplied with Dorico.
I’ve had a quick Google and there are a couple of somewhat inexpensive Kontakt instruments that provide body percussion libraries (e.g. here and here), but both require the full Kontakt instrument rather than the free Kontakt Player, so that may put them out of reach.
You can alter which sounds are used for percussion instruments as follows:
In Library > Percussion Maps, create a new empty percussion map.
Add one or more entries to the percussion map for the MIDI note or notes you have identified in the drum kit patch you want to use, and set instrument to e.g. Patsch and playing technique to Natural.
In Play mode, select the Patsch instrument in the track overview and look at the Routing section of the Track Inspector panel on the left-hand side.
Click the little cog button to open the Endpoint Setup dialog.
For the channel corresponding to the Patsch instrument in your score, change the entry under Percussion Map to be your newly-created percussion map made in steps 1 and 2.
Thanks for this, @dspreadbury . If one wanted to put in a feature request for basic body percussion sounds, would that be best done through one of the other Steinberg forums?
