Finale’s Garritan instruments

[pfmusician]

Is there an easy way to use Finale’s Garritan instruments in Dorico? I’m not happy with the Dorico sounds. I’d like to just start a project and hear the Finale sounds automatically without doing workarounds. Thanks in advance.

[Eggsalad]

Aria Player works with Dorico. To use it, or any VST, you either load it manually or apply a Playback Template which includes it. Playback Templates are easy to apply to projects but not easy to create.

Here’s info on loading VSTs manually:

Loading VST/MIDI instruments manually

Here’s info on Playback Templates:

Playback templates

@benwiggy created GPO Expression Maps, Playback Templates, and other helpful Garritan-Dorico things (not sure if these are the most recent versions):

Dorico Expression Maps for GPO5

Here are my Expression Maps for using GPO5 with Dorico. The package includes: documentation of what I’ve done, so that you can understand it and adapt it to your needs; a spreadsheet of what switches and CCs various instrument groups use, and which Brass instruments use which maps. There’s also a general-purpose Garritan Ex map, which should work (to some degree) for other Garritan libraries, such as the bundled Finale instruments. Let me know how you get on, and if there are any egregious pro…

Hope this helps!

EDIT
This topic was recently discussed here:

Setting ARIA Player as default

You’ll need to create a playback template, and then set that playback template to be the default for new projects on the Play page of Preferences. That sounds simple, but there’s quite a bit to it. The first question: which sounds do you want to use? The Garittan Instruments For Finale? GPO5? Something else? You’ll then need to create a project that contains the instruments whose sounds you want to change, manually assign the ARIA Player and load the appropriate sounds for each one, then speci…

[billsshepherd]

I agree the Garritan sounds are better. I’ve been using Finale for 25 years but have now shifted to Dorico and have been using it for about 3 days. I don’t know much, but I was able to load Garritan JABB3 for a score I imported from Finale via MusicXML. I downloaded the Playback template (Garritan JABB.dorico_pt) and followed the “Important - read me” instructions that came with it. The one thing that was not obvious to me was exactly where to find the Play > Playback Templates…" dialog (you have to use the Play menu bar at the top, not the Play mode tab). “Import” is at the bottom of the dialog. After downloading, I selected “Apply and Close” but was still not getting the Garritan sounds. I went back to the Apply Project Template dialog and highlighted Garritan, which was now the top selection, and hit Apply and Close. Voila, JABB3 sounds!

[bandjwright]

I would be very interested in the Garritan World Instruments libraries.

[benwiggy]

There are about 350 separate instruments in the Garritan World instruments library, so setting up the whole thing will take a bit of work.

Half of the instruments will work fine with either the Default (Note Velocity) expression map (for percussive, short samples); and the other half will use the Modulation Wheel Dynamics map (for sustaining instruments).

There are almost no key switches, and very few meaningful CCs to control any characteristics.

So, assuming you only want to use a particular set of instruments, it shouldn’t take long to create a Dorico project with the instruments you want to use; set up ARIA VSTs for each one; load the appropriate samples from World; apply the Expression maps.

Then you can save this setup as an “Endpoint” (small down arrow in the VST and MIDI panel, next to the + button for adding VSTs.)

Finally, go to the Play menu > Playback Template. Create a new template that uses the Endpoint that you’ve just made. (Possibly mixed with other Endpoints, too.)

And you’re done! You can now apply your template to any documents.

John Barron has made a number of videos demonstrating the process for various libraries.