With the VSL Special Edition, separate instruments are used for some muted brass rather than articulations. The mute instruments match the articulations of the normal instrument. I found for the rare occasions when I’ve used this in Dorico so far that the easiest solution seems to be create a new instrument called “muted trumpet” for the trumpet players. The switch by moving the section to the mute staff in galley view works fine – or so I thought. In playback, however, although it switches to the correct instrument, it ignores articulation switches.
Fair enough, there are a number of possible reasons. But what I find puzzling is that it works perfectly when you bring up the part view or when you click on a note to audition it but in full score, it doesn’t. Without reference to a particular project, how can it be possible that Dorico reads an EM correctly in part view but not for full score? I should make it clear that the non-muted trumpet (with NoteLength and secondary dynamic controller) works fine throughout as do all other instruments.
If you are using the VI version, you can have unmuted and muted trumpets on the same channel, just set up two identical matrices and use a Key Switch in the Expression map to switch between them. If you set this up with ADD-ON techniques (rather than BASE) the rest of the playing techniques should work identically for both muted and unmuted…
the clue to the problem was, as I said initially, that it works fine when in a single staff view and not full score. Which made me convinced that there was an issue in the setup and there was. Although polyphonic legato allows you to share channels if necessary among players, the same does not apply when sharing instruments which I hadn’t realised. I had one channel for two muted trumpets and this is what had confused Dorico and probably explains why in single staff mode it worked. This means the EM doesn’t need entries for mutes at all as the switch to a mute instrument is purely done by switching a player’s instrument – in other words MIDI channel. I think this way is probably the neatest for the score as otherwise you’ll have a player called “mute trumpet” (although there are fiddly ways around this I seem to remember)
I always was a bit wary of sharing MIDI channels but have done so sometimes to keep the number of instruments for one section within one instance of Vienna Ensemble (don’t have Pro). Increasingly, and particularly after this, I’m going to try and increasingly eliminate this rather lazy habit and fully endorse your advice
(generally speaking)