I wrote a string quartett and exported a midi-file out of Dorico.
Playing it with the windowsmediaplayer adds a low key F#'0 to every midi-channel of the string quartett, that does not exist in my partiture.
Opening the quartett.mid with cubase8.5 shows the F#0 in every midi-channel.
It only happens in string quartett. I tried the same with a piano piece, but there is no mistake.
I wrote another string quartett and the mistake happened again.
The reason for this is that these are the keyswitches used to switch between the different playing techniques. If you assign the same HSO instruments in Cubase then you will hear it use the same techniques (eg switching between arco/pizz).
Thanks. So there is a initial wrong loaded instrument in Cubase8.5 (Halion SE) instead of Symphonic Orchestra, which is also available, but not loaded.
And in the Halion SE patches there is no keyswitch. So it’s played as a note instead of keyswitching.
I manually changed the Instruments in Cubase to Symphonic Orchestra and the low disturbing noise is gone, because Symphonic Orchestra knows to handle the keyswitches.
So there should be a warning, that midi-file-exports do odd things with GM-players like windowsmediaplayer or standardimport into sequencing software.
This is because MIDI doesn’t have any way of encoding device or routing data in it. Cubase just tries to load something. In the future it is likely that we’ll be able to export MIDI files with GM program changes, or have options to suppress extra controllers and keyswitches.
I just tried entering some simple GM Expression Maps into Dorico.
Here’s the Expression Map library that can be imported.
GMStrings.zip (1.39 KB)
While these will not implement the technique changes with Sonic SE in GM Mode (Found in SE’s Options Tab) through Dorico (Program Change events aren’t being sent when Dorico Plays live to a plugin), they DO seem to export the proper program changes when using Dorico’s Export as MIDI. The catch is that some SMF players can’t change programs fast enough to play such renderings back without editing the SMF file and sliding the program changes a few ticks sooner.
In this example I loaded a score, imported the Expression Maps above, and set everything but the strings to use the "Default’ expression map. I chose My GM Ensemble Strings Map for all my string parts and set Expression Maps to send program changes for Pizzicato and Tremolo techniques. I went ahead and added solo strings to the map library as well. Note that it’s a good idea to skip channel 10 for SMF files (unless it’s a drum kit), as many SMF players just reject program changes over channel 10 (Channel 10 also skipped in the flow/player tabs of my score).
This will at least make it easy to import such MIDI renderings into other DAWs, and still have a place marker for the technique’s offered in the GM1 instrument list.
