Dorico 5 pro: playback template for EW Hollywood Orchestra Opus?

Dorico
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Hi Dorico folks!

Rookie question ahead…
Dorico (5 pro) comes with several pre-installed playback templates for e.g. Halion SE / Iconica Sketch. Although I am just scratching at the surface of Dorico, I wondered if there exists a similar playback template for EastWest Hollywood Orchestra Library as well - I would pay for it.
Thanks in advance for your help!

Best

David

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Hi @Ottonis, have a look at this site, maybe you find something useful for you:

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This thread from just last week, might be of help. You could ask other questions there?

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Thanks a lot! There are lots of playback templates in that list - unfortunately none of them that would fit to my library. I may try to use a similar one (e.g. EWQL Symphonic Orchestra) and then modify it to suit my needs and work with the EW Hollywood Orchestra Opus).

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That’s a very rich resource that deals with the topic of playback templates. Even if there’s no direct solution to my problem, there is still lot of very useful and helpful information. Thanks for sharing!!

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I have a relatively complete template if you’d like it. It will take me a day or two to document it but if you’re interested, let me know.

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wow, that would be awesome, thank you so much for that offer. You must have put tons of work into creating this template.

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A bit, but I should warn you, if you don’t have a machine with at least 70GB of memory, it won’t work. I have a bunch of instances in Vienna Ensemble Server with 128GB ram, and idle, it takes ~ 64GB – and that’s with Windows 11 memory compression at work.

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So, that’s 70 GB of RAM that you meant and not SSD-storage, right? I currently have a puny amount 16GB of RAM in my machine. I looked up and found that it supports a maximum of 64 GB of RAM. So, that’s the upper limit of my current system. When I built it, I never thought I would ever need that much memory, yikes.

Could I exclude some instruments from the template (e.g. the entire percussion section etc), since I mostly don’t need them for the type of music I primarily do, and would that reduce the amount of RAM necessary to run this template?

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Yes, e.g., with absolutely nothing else running on the machine except VEP:

Screenshot 2025-07-17 at 05.37.32
Screenshot 2025-07-17 at 05.37.32787×184 7.81 KB

… that’s with windows memory compression at work. When the VEP project initially loads, it gets into the 80GB RAM range.

Here are the woodwinds.
EWH-Woodwinds.zip (1.8 MB)

Included are screenshots for

  1. The Opus instance(s)
  2. Articulations (active keyswitches) for each instrument in the instance

… as well as the shared expression map.

I changed every instrument’s keyswitches (hence the screenshots) so they are standardized to one expression map. Obviously, not all instruments have all articulations so there are logical substitutes for entries in the expression map. Also, I really only use common articulations but as I need new ones, I just add them.

With the screenshots and expression map, you can create your own template with just the instruments you need to reduce the memory footprint.

As with any template that one creates from a library, it’s is a continual work-in-progress. There are certain techniques that I add, levels to adjust, reverb etc. – never ends, but when I open my project template and start to write, I’m pretty satisfied with the way it sounds.

I’ll do the brass next.

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The Brass:
EWH-Brass.zip (1.4 MB)

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Strings:
EWH-Strings.zip (649.1 KB)

Strings 2 (my preference these days):
EWH-Strings-2.zip (637.0 KB)

A few words about the strings:

  1. The Opus instances and expression map is channel-based instead of keyswitches.
  2. There are some cross-instrument articulations, e.g., 2nd Violins don’t have harmonics, so I used the articulation from the 1st Violins.
  3. Basses lack a few of the articulations found in all the others, so you will notice logical substitutions.

Finally, a Dorico project which no one will be able to use :slight_smile: because I decoupled my VEP instances. So if one has VEP, a bunch of empty instances will show up. I wanted to share the project because of how it all fits together.
ew-project-template - vep.dorico (1.5 MB)

Notes:

  1. There are custom instruments for section woodwinds and brass (a2, a3, a6 etc.)
  2. There are only 4 layouts because I never print parts: Full Score, Play, Print (condensed) and Sketch. Play and Print are the ones I adjust on a per-project basis.

Have fun.

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OMG, I am at loss for words. Thank you so much!!! I will definitely try this out!