The pads for drums set note input are great! The default order is not what I’d like and of course you can change the order. In case you were like me and it’s taking you a minute to wrap your head around the process of getting them in to your preferred order, here are my steps.
-First rule of Fight Club…(oops wrong list)
See attached the default
I took the basic drum set and added slashes with and without stems. The Bongo which I use for cues above and a Conga which I use for cues below.
-Touch the control to change the order and add space to fill all the empty spots in the top row.
I’m only going to have 4 pads in the row but this helps me visually.
-Rule 1: Any pad can be moved in any position in the row it’s already in without kicking a pad to the another row
-Rule 2: Pull up a pad from the row below, the first pad (in receiving row on the left) gets sent to the end of the row you are pulling from
-Rule 3: Pull down a pad from the row above, the last pad (in the receiving row the right) gets sent to the start of the row you are pulling from
Knowing this here’s my sequence and I can get the order I require very quickly:
1-Bottom row slide all the pads you want to keep to the left in that row
2-Next row up same, slide everything you want to keep in that row to the left
3-Now slide everything in the middle row you want in the bottom row to the right of the last pad in the bottom row you want to keep.
4-Row 2 slide everything you want to keep to the left in that row
5-In my case I just now pull down 3 spacers from the top row into the middle row, between the pads I want to keep in row 2 and those which I want in the top row, which forces the pads I want in the top row up.
6-Now it’s just a matter of reordering in each row within itself as needed.
I end up with this:
It took me a while to figure out how to set mine up the other day.
I’m sure others will appreciate your guide (thank you!) I wonder why it isn’t easier!
This works indeed well but it is rather challenging to also get all percussion instruments sounding in a balanced way. I have managed to show all in write and play mode and have been able to link sounding instruments to each of them but the percussion set players are not shown in the mixer as instruments. Not even as a single fader. You see it as Midi lane but that is useless for mixing.
For a regular drum kit, by default all sounds will be played by a single patch in your VST instrument, so there is only a single fader corresponding to the whole kit. You would need to manually assign each instrument in the kit to a different channel to then see a separate fader in the Mixer for each instrument.
Thanks for the fast answer David. I now see one fader for untuned percussion as last one before the master output but it has no effect on the instruments.
I should probably have used separate players instead of the kit in setup but the midi import set it up that way. So I have allocated each instrument in the kit to a virtual library instrument. I had to mix BBCSO untuned percussion instruments with VSL Prime percussion as none of these two had all instruments needed. That works but if you do that you cannot allocate a virtual instrument to the main percussion player as Dorico will then change the whole set. You can manually change each instrument not fitting back again but that is a waste of time. So I balance the different percussion instruments with velocity, cc11 and cc7.
Still no way to get the score order of players in the mixer as far as I can see by the way.
Mixer faders are ordered according to the outputs from your plug-ins, rather than the instruments in the score, since it’s an audio mixer driven by the configuration of your plug-ins, rather than the other way around.
That would be no issue if you could at least move them or delete other than the last in the list in the rack. Cubase also has that lack of basic functionality in the rack but the mixer orders according to the tracks which can be ordered freely.
The only option in Dorico to add a plugin in accordance with the player list is deleting all entries in the rack from the bottom up till you get to the insert point and reconstruct all you deleted hoping you did not forget one.
