One of the reasons I like Orchestral Tools is the great many articulations offered. Am having problems with Expression Maps with more than 14 or so articulation changes in a staff. Here is an example using Beaufort.
Notice that in bar 15 I had to add “nat” to make this work:
If you look at the Playing Techniques at the bottom you can see where they disappear in the second example in bar 16
Hard to say without looking at the file. Maybe StaccatissimoX should be in a Mutual Exclusion Group with the following technique(s) but isn’t?
if your playback techniques are Directions then they remain active until specifically cancelled so unless, as @Eggsalad says, there are mutual exclusions in place or a resetting “nat”, Dorico will look for p.t combinations which presumably don’t exist. It’s unlikely to have anything to do with the total number of articulations in the map. I’ve never had any issues with articulation switching in my own OT libraries (although I don’t have that many)
I think we’re on to something here as all articulations are indeed set as Directions. If I’m understanding this, then Dorico is trying to add the articulations together so that by bar 15 it’s trying to simultaneously play 15 articulations at once. I don’t have any mutual exclusion groups. What I want to have happen is to change articulations and not add to them. So a series of one articulation then change ariticulations for another series. So what what should be my setup?
If these expressions are all “either one or another”, then you DO want them to be in a Mutual Exclusion group.
Pull down the flap at the bottom of the Expressions Map editor.
Now we’re getting somewhere! I pulled down the flap and looked a the Mutual Exclusion Group where I saw the "Create Mutual Exclusion Groups Automatically checked. It seemed like all the articulations were they but the scroll bar doesn’t work when this is checked so don’t know if all the articulations where there or not. So I unchecked that box, entered in all the articulations and gave it a name. This seems to work as all articulations show up as expected in Playing Techniques at the bottom. Will have some work to do now updating all my expression maps to include Mutual Exclusion Groups. I checked some of my other expression maps so see what “auto” came up with and sometimes it’s just 2 or 3 articulations and never all of them. Guess it’s best not to depend on “auto” mode. At any rate thanks to all contributors for helping me resolve this issue.
Glad it’s working! Another helpful thing is hovering over Playing Technique regions in Key Editor, where you can see active techniques. Dorico tries to find an expression map switch or combination of switches to match all active techniques.
I’ve encountered that situation and it turned out to be typo on my part so useful for finding things like that so can get Dorico to play my techniques as in my sample libraries.
