Dorico with Roland SC-88 Pro

Dorico
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Hi! First forum post here. Disclaimer is that this is going to be a newbie question as I just bought Dorico Elements this week and haven’t used it in the past at all.

Yeah, so I got an old Roland SC-88 Pro for Christmas. I realized that there are more modern solutions to playback by a long shot.. I’ve heard good things about Note Performer and I’m sure it would make my life a lot easier for composing without having to worry too much about setup. But, I love N64/Playstation 1 era soundtracks, so for that reason I’m looking at using the SC-88 Pro while composing in Dorico, and I’d like to get the most out of it.

I’ve figured out how to use CCs to control things like volume and panning. But, I’m curious about how far I can go with articulations. For example, the SC-88 Pro has a portamento feature that’s controlled in a pretty standard way with CC 5, 65, and 84. It uses CC 0 and 32 to switch between variation sounds, which I think was part of the original GS specification. And, then there might be other possibilities related to expression, like changing to a different variation sound for certain expressions (muted distortion guitar vs standard distortion guitar, for example, or attack violin, regular violin, and slow violin).

My question is - should I be looking at creating an expression map for these things related to articulation, or a playback template that includes one or more expression maps? And, would it also make sense to try to get some basic volume control in there with CC 11 that corresponds to dynamics markings? I’m not completely clear yet on how these two concepts relate (playback templates and expression maps), and if it makes more sense to use one expression map for this device, or separate maps for each instrument that I’m planning to use, with the possibility to add more later. I’m also wondering if it’s possible to map different variation sounds to different playing techniques and articulations, like palm mute and legato.

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I don’t think there is a CC0. Do you mean Program Changes?

In short: expression maps are exactly how you translate musical notation elements into MIDI commands. You can set the dynamic volume to use CC11, and assign various expressions, like portamento, to a given CC.

Playback templates configure everything for Dorico’s instruments to make a sound. This includes the VST (HALion, ARIA, Kontakt, etc); the VST preset (the loaded samples); and the expression map that links them all together.

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In Dorico…

  • You notate Playing Techniques on the score.
  • You connect those Playing Techniques to Playback Techniques.
  • You use an Expression Map (for each instrument) to translate those Playback Techniques into instructions that a particular VST (or MIDI instrument) will understand to load a particular sound.
  • You (can) combine the whole into a Playback Template, so Dorico can load everything it needs to re-use this set up in different scores.
4 Likes
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Thanks for your reply! CC0 - I’m not sure if it’s very common anymore, or maybe it’s the typical thing where some systems start and 1 and others at zero - or you might just know them as bank select MSB and bank select LSB - but yeah check out the page here on Roland GS if you’re curious to hear more about how CC0 and CC32 were used to access sounds beyond the standard 128 that you get with a program change - Roland GS - Wikipedia

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That makes it very clear; thank you!