Hello. To play a harp piece in Emaj in Dorico on the Synchron Harp I thought it would be a simple matter of connecting up appropriate exp. map, selecting pedal mode in the SH player and choosing E from the Key Wheel. Emaj plays ok on the harp player keyboard. Let’s say you play and Alberti bass figure (in Emaj), as soon as Dorico plays the G# note the key jumps to A-flat.
The only way I can get it to work properly in Dorico is to flatten every sharp note. Is this the only way to get this to work or am I missing something.
I can of course switch to Chromatic mode and KS to pedal mode if needed and it will work fine. I thought about harp pedal diagrams but I am assuming these are passive.
Hi Thanks for the reply. As I understand it, when a harpist plays in Emaj the pedals are set such that all G’s (among others) are raised by a semitone. In the synchron harp in pedal mode only the white keys are played on the keyboard. In Dorico Emaj is notated as you would expect with a G#.
Hi. Ignore the D in bar 2 in the first and third images - this was me accidentally nudging it up when I was setting up the screen capture, it should ofcourse be a B.
… both of which are very different from Vienna’s pedalling.
Wouldn’t it be easier just to use the Chromatic playback, and just play the notes that Dorico gives it? You don’t need the VST to understand pedalling, do you?
You’ll have to use the Synchron Harp in Chromatic mode I believe.
The problem with Pedal mode, it is intended for a DAW. You use only the white piano keys to play and the black piano keys change the harp pedal settings. Dorico won’t understand this and so it will play the black piano keys that will change the pedal settings.
Yes – I have a different Harp library, but I’ve never used Pedal mode. Looking at it now, it seems designed for Harpists who want to play the white notes live, as if they were harp strings, rather than as if they were playing a piano.
Because when pedalling is on, playing a C natural gives you a C# (or however it’s configured). And playing a C# gives you nothing.
Whereas, you just want the VST to play the notes that Dorico gives it, whatever they are.
Thanks. I’m ok with the pedalling diagrams etc. I’m just a bit miffed that there isn’t anything in the Harp vst to translate the incoming G# as a Gnat - as the composer you wouldn’t send the harp anything other than the appropriate scale notes. Or maybe Dorico could read the pedal diagram at the start of the score and flatten all the sharps on the fly. I’m using it in Chromatic mode and I can use KS to get back and forth from Pedal mode if I need to. - CD
I would just rely on Dorico’s Out of Range notes (and Proofreading!) to make sure your Harp settings are correct on the page, and just let the VST play whatever it gets sent.
Actually the main point is for glissandi. The Synchron harp doesn’t have prerecorded glissandi, they are performed by playing all the individual notes in between and the Synchron Harp player will recognize that a glissando is being performed and switch to specially altered samples for that purpose. In pedal mode you can drag your finger up and down the white keys alone to get a glissando. It is much harder to play a harp glissando on a piano live if you have to worry about accidentals.
But in Dorico, you aren’t likely to be playing glissandi in the first place.
Thanks. I mistakenly assumed that if you put a pedal diagram in the score Dorico would automatically send the adjusted pitch to a harp vst which only used white notes. No such luck.
Dorico would have to have specific support for the unusual way that Synchron harp works. Most harp libraries out there don’t have such a function. It makes very little sense to me to support this when the chromatic mode works just fine. There are no advantages of the pedal mode if you aren’t playing things in via the midi controller in the first place. You wouldn’t want to play harp glissandi live into Dorico because it would probably render all the notes in between instead of a line.
If you want this because you will bring it into a DAW after and you might want to re-record the glissandi as live played ones, I would set up a second track with another copy of the harp in pedal mode for glissandi.
