Expression Map

Hi, The expression mapping in Dorico is good, especialy Cubase Ex. Map import feature…but one thing you missed. In Actions windows is no chance to set up MIDI Chanell. I cannot use expression for many VST specialy for East West Player, because they have legato and other articulation separated…and only chance to have them together is on different chanells.
Please this is serious…

PS: Strange things happened if you increase Lenght % value in next open Transpose is 1 and Lenght % value still 100…
And It is realy strange too, but expression doesn’t work in other VST at all (Kontakt, EWQL Play). Please make some tutorial about Expression mapping (not for Halion).
…forget Halion…Try to focus on better VSTs…

I can’t figure it out either.

Tried with Halion 5, imported an expression map from Cubase. All keyswithes are set up, just can’t find a way how to use them (link them to any articulation or playing technique).

Same problem : my Cubase expression map imports failed. The reason is simple : I use different midi channels for different articulations (for instance with 8dio Adagio I need one Kontakt midi channel for Legato, one Kontakt midi channel for the “short” articulations - idem with 8dio Requiem where I need to differentiate Long and Short).

But it seems that with Dorico only one VST instrument and midi channel can be mapped. So I cannot use my VST instruments properly.

Did the Dorico team plan to map a VST instrument (with all its midi channels) to a Player instead of a VST instrument AND a midi channel ? And to implement midi channel selection in the expression map ?

Currently the routing of Players and use of Expression Maps is at a very early stage. You can only select a single ‘Endpoint’ (= plugin + channel) for each of a Player’s Instruments. However our plan is that you will be able to assign a single player to multiple Endpoints. The typical use case for this is that you have different playing techniques on different channels (or even through different plugins). This will require more complex UI to set all the endpoints of each instrument, and we haven’t been able to do this yet.

For the expression maps, you would have different ones for each technique (or at least for all techniques that can be played with the same channel) rather than one big one with all techniques.

Very cool Paul … will it also be possible to create several different versions of expression maps for one and the same instrument?

For example, a piece with two solo violins (and a few other instruments), both with techniques like legato / martele / spiccato / sul ponte / pizzicato, etc.

It would be nice to be able to use different solo violin VSTs for each of them … just to get a bit of variety in the playback.

Will there be a user guide or instructions on how to set up the expression maps as well? I’ve never been able to understand the soundset editor in Sibelius … hopefully it’ll be much easier in Dorico.

Thanks!

Many thanks for this !!! Looks very promising !

Peter - yes, that’s the sort of thing we’re aiming for. However, unlike Sibelius where the Soundset/Playback Configuration system was intended to make things totally automatic (at the expense of flexibility), our intention in Dorico is to make the simple things simple but give greater control to the user as to how they want to route their instruments, so if you wanted to route some of your violins to VSL and others to Aria, apart from when they play pizz, in which case you want them to use EW Play, then that’s the kind of thing that you’ll be able to do.

Obviously, given this amount of extra flexibility, Dorico won’t be able to do it all automatically because you have to tell it what you want. The intention is that Playback Templates will be a way of doing this, where you set up a score using a representative sample of instruments (eg the usual orchestral combination that you write for) and then you route all instruments to the plugins you want and save the template. Dorico then uses that as a ‘configuration by example’, so it knows that in this configuration you want the first flute to use VSL, the second flute to use EW Play, etc.

We can’t give any promises as to when this will happen, but this is our vision for how the Playback feature will evolve.

Thanks Paul — yes, this is very cool and what I’d like to see.

I’m repeating myself but as you know there are dozens and dozens of virtual instruments, and every day there’s a new one … and everyone has their own favorites. They all work (slightly) differently, so it’s not realistic for anyone to expect you to develop automatic loading.

But if you can create a relatively simple way to create expression maps and playback templates, you’ll find that people will create their own playback templates, and maybe share them as well.

That may be a lot of work, but film composers spend hours and hours and hours putting together master templates, loading everything under the sun into huge master templates so they have everything at their fingertips.

It’s a one time exercise - well until you start shifting everything around which happens frequently - so if you can call those templates up easily, it’d be a huge thing.

Yes, that was exactly our thinking. Invest time in one-off setups and then apply those to new projects

Any news on using expression maps with Kontakt 5 or other VSTs? I prefer to work on notations software when composing, and Dorico looks great, but I don’t think I’ll be giving the step until I know I can use it with other VSTs. I’ve been using finale with custom playback rules to compose and get a nice/decent mockup at the same time (I use instrument banks in kontakt instead of channels, so I can load lots of articulations in a single channel. and the custom rule make them pretty automatic to use). The only downside is that Finale is slow. They never made a 64bit version. I’ve been eyeing Dorico for a while and the note entering looks amazing, plus the Cubase sound engine and Dorico is 64bit, all that makes it really juicy. But… it won’t be of much use until it can play nice with other VSTs… And that means an Expression map system that works with any VST, not just in-house ones. Anyway, I’ll be waiting and hoping.

Oh, on another note… it would be pretty cool if they could add Track freezing like in cubase (for those of us that don’t have 32GB of ram…)…

Anyway, thanks for your attention.