Excess Tracks for Percussion Kit Configurations

Hi all - I have a few questions about the playback and track configuration workflow. I’m mostly curious about the design philosophy so I can to wrap my head around this to make my projects less cluttered and to satisfy a frustration I’ve had with play mode for a while.

I tend to work with percussion kits, both built-in and custom, so I think have a general idea of how the system works. This thing has been on the back of my mind for a while, but recently, it’s been causing frustrations that reading the manual and searching the forum haven’t been able to satisfy. With that said, I could easily be missing something since my time with Dorico is sporadic and dependent on my schedule!

  • My main frustration (using a new project as an example): In setup mode, a player holds 2 instruments: a pitched mallet instrument and a percussion kit (that contains a single cymbal), all using HALion Sonic SE for sounds. In play mode, the track header shows 3 tracks for this player: the mallet instrument, the percussion kit, and the instrument within it. Why is there a track for the kit as whole? As far as I can tell, it serves no purpose. The notes from the instruments within it don’t show up, and I can remove its sound from the HALion control panel and percussion map from the endpoint configuration without anything happening - as long the individual instruments inside it are properly configured.

  • This question goes for the mixer as well. My assumption would be for it to show the sound accumulation of all the instruments it contains and be able to control the kit wholly without controlling each instrument separately, but that doesn’t seem to be the case - it doesn’t do anything that I can find either.

  • My reasoning: The project I’m currently working on has multiple copies of this type of performer and it takes up a lot of space in the track list and mixer that seems to be wasted. If the tracks for these kits have to exist for the system backend to work, why not have a method of grouping and collapsing the tracks for each instrument or kit in play mode and the mixer, similarly to the player panel in setup mode?

  • Is there a better way to setup my project that doesn’t cause this?

Thanks!

There’s no way to set things up at present in such a way that you won’t get a separate track for the percussion kit itself. The one advantage that the kit track provides is that you can change the routing for all of the instruments in the kit in one go from the kit track.

I agree that it would be useful to be able to group tracks in the Mixer, and this is something we would like to introduce in a future version of the software.

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