Dorico Drumkit Import

The Import of individual Percussion Kits doesn´t work perfect!
Loading the Studio Drummer (Kontakt), creating a Percussion Map, than creating the Kit (Player) works fine. By opening this file (I name it file 1 now) all is working good. But: creating a new score (file 2), adding a player by importing the created kit, loading the map and exactly the same Kontakt Setup, the Kit is wrong! Every note is placed as a Cymbal. Little trick: Importing the kit by importing file 1 and taking the player from there, all works fine again! It would be nice, if this bug would be fixed by the next update!

Welcome to the forum, GP3541hx3152. How are you importing the music from Kontakt? Via MIDI or some other way?

Hello Daniel, thanks for your reply. I don’t talk about imported files. This happens by writing music. Kontakt is loaded via vst. After trying many times again, I have to say, the player causes the trouble. It happens by leaving the vst slot empty, too. If I make a new percussion kit with some different noteheads and playing techniques identical to the own percussion map all works. I export the kit, all works. Than creating a new file and importing the kit, the player shows only an " a", no matter what note is played. In the original file made by creating the kit all works. When I import the file as new flow and take the player from there, than bassdrum, snare etc is all where it should be. Only by cymbals every time a normal cross is shown, the created notehead for bell for example is not present. Thanks for your help.

Once you’ve imported the kit into the new project, do you also go and replicate the settings in the Endpoint Setup dialog, i.e. specifying which percussion map should be used for that channel?

Yes. Tried both, importing first the map and also first the kit…
By playing on the keyboard the correct notes are played, too. Only the notation is wrong…

… And specified it in the vst setup of course…

It suggests that some aspect of the kit is not being imported correctly. Can you please provide the actual files you’re working with?

Ok, here´s a file “A”, that´s were the new kit is made, works correctly. The file “B” is the file, where the perc map and the kit from file A is imported. …and the kit file and map file…
Here´s the Download-Link, can not atach it directly (“invalid file extension”…???)
https://www.magentacloud.de/share/qn3v.5m1ku

Thanks for your patience…

You can attach anything here as long as you zip (compress) it first.

Ah, okay…
Here are the dorico files…
B.zip (1.22 MB)
A.zip (1.24 MB)

…and here are kit and map…
KitandMap.zip (7.25 KB)

Frustrating…
Percussion map is made correctly, kit is made correctly, programmed notes play correctly (in file “a”, not in file “b”) but by importing midi all is wrong. By importing the drum track directly from the windows in cubase it works a little bit better. The notes are played correct, but one note is here wrong, too. The developers praised the flexi ility of dorico. Where is the flexibility by drums? Kontakt is used by many people. Set it up in Sibelius all works fine by created percussion maps or the percussion pitch map plugin. Dorico costs a lot of money, but if you need to work with daw and notation at the same time and there are so massive problems, dorico isn’t a good investment then. Sorry, that’s my opinion. Seems like the philosophy is the same like in cubase. A lot of more functions but nothing works at 100 percent. Sorry for my bad words but it is frustrating to spend a lot of hours in techniqual things instead of composing.
Although thanks for your trying to help and forgive my bad english.

Sorry that I’ve not yet had a chance to look into this in detail. I have kept your thread open here, and this related one, and I will look into it as soon as I have the time to really dig into it and understand the problem.

Hello Daniel,
looked at the thread. That sounds similar…
Thanks for your help.

Love this forum! lol - I was just about to report this exact same problem! I did exactly wha the OP did and with Kontakt Studio Drummer as well!

In File 1:

  1. Create Percussion Map for Studio Drummer
  2. Create custom Kit for player
  3. Set up the endpoint setup for the Kit to use the appropriate Map
    Everything works as it should.
  4. Export library for both the Kit and the Map

In File 2:

  1. Add instrument by importing Kit
  2. Import Map
  3. Set up the VST and assign the instrument to the new imported Map
    In Write mode, I will get the right sounds by playing the keyboard and I can even write the correct notes in using letters on the computer keyboard, but entering notes via the MIDI keyboard results in writing only the bass drum no matter which note I play.

Daniel, I’m attaching a ZIP file with both files and the exported libraries in question.
JL Libraries.zip (9.56 KB)
JL File 2.dorico.zip (1.24 MB)
JL File 1.dorico.zip (1.39 MB)

With apologies that it has taken me some four months to return to this thread, I am happy to say that we now have a handle on this problem, and that a fix will be included in the next Dorico 3.x update (provided it passes muster with our internal testing team).

The problem is caused by the fact that when you export a percussion kit, Dorico has to mutate the IDs of the instruments in the kit so that when you import the kit into another project, the instruments defined in the kit don’t collide with any of the instruments you already have in the destination project (e.g. if you already have, say, a snare drum in your destination project and you’ve defined some custom playing technique appearances for that instrument, you wouldn’t want the snare drum in the imported kit to overwrite that edited snare drum, causing your custom playing techniques to be lost).

This is all as it should be, but where things fall down is when Dorico is trying to map from the note you play on your MIDI keyboard to the percussion instrument in the kit, by way of the percussion map. The percussion map can’t know about custom instrument IDs, so it will always refer to, say, the default ID for a snare drum or whatever. When you play a note on the MIDI keyboard with the ‘Use percussion map’ input option set, Dorico has to go and look up which percussion instrument corresponds to that note, according to the percussion map: having discovered it’s a bass drum, for example, it then has to look for the best match for the requested bass drum in the percussion kit. At the moment, Dorico isn’t being clever enough about looking for a match, so it’s missing the custom bass drum in the kit because its ID isn’t similar enough. We need to improve Dorico’s ability to fuzzy match the instruments present in the kit with the instruments it’s looking for as defined in the percussion map.

Now that we understand the problem it should be straightforward enough to fix. Sorry again for the very long delay in finding the time to really dig into this problem and find out what was going wrong.

Hello Daniel,
Thanks for your reply. Now after the dorico 3.10 update the kit can be imported, but every key that’s played show’s “crash cymbal”.
Sounds good, that your team is searching for a solution. What I don’t understand: why so difficult? It would be easier if the midi keyboard would send note number, the kit gives the note number to the map and vice versa instead of searching for “snare” etc.
In this case all would work if the same kit and map and same instrument would be imported. Okay, you know yourself best what to do. I’m happy to hear that you and your team will fix the problem. I think dorico is on a good way. Best regards!

…long time ago I asked about Kontakt Drums… in Dorico 3.5 it´s the same problem… after one complete year…frustrating… I think I will move back to Avid Sibelius…

Have you looked at the videos about creating playback templates in 3.5 to see if that would suit your needs.

(Expand the text screen below the video to see a “Table of Contents” for topics in the video.)

Does Kontakt have anything similar to the Save and Load Ensemble function that Garritan does?