I’m finding lots of posts about guitar dead notes and proper playback thereof, but they all seem older and don’t seem to match up to what I’m seeing in Dorico 5 (and I’m curious about Dorico 6).
Could I get an updated answer about both how to create a dead note the proper way in notation (creating a cross notehead) and also how to map that to a playback technique. I thought I was beginning to understand some of this, but I don’t see a way to map notehead types to playback techniques, which is what this seems to be. Are guitar and bass dead notes somehow “special cased” behind the scenes to a playback technique? Also I don’t see dead notes listed in Playing Techniques, which is maybe related to this special treatment?
If you create the dead note by using the “Dead note” property in the properties panel, it will trigger the “Muted” playback technique in the expression map (if there is one).
OK, now I see that. But I’m still a bit confused about a couple things.
First of all, it doesn’t seem there is a Muted playing technique by default in the Halion Sonic guitars. Is there a way to get this sound out of Halion Sonic (sorry, I’m a relative beginner to Dorico, trying to evaluate, and really complete playback capabilities are one of the main draws)?
Also, it seems like this approach is a sort of behind the scenes way of getting around the fact that configurable Playing Techniques seem to have to be either added Text or Glyphs. You can’t say "for this part/instrument, I would like cross notepads to map to the Muted playback technique. So you could by accident have some cross noteheads that don’t map to the Muted playback technique. Seems non-ideal, but am I understanding this correctly?
One of the reasons I ask is because I also play in a steel drum band, and the visual representation for a roll in Dorico is shown under “repeats”, but with a suitably fancy steel pan library, you’d actually want it to map rolls to a separate playback technique. This is similar situation to the guitar situation, only I don’t see how you would do that at all.
Given the otherwise super complete system of Playing Techniques and Playback Techniques, this seems like a pretty big oversight. (That is, you can only configure your own Playing Techniques by adding text or adding a glyph).
The reason we introduced the “Dead note” property wasn’t anything to do with playback - it was that we wanted the notes to be able to draw as an “X” on both the notation and tab staves. You can of course just change the notehead, as we have a general-purpose way of doing that on any instrument, but that will only affect the notation staff.
Having then already introduced the “Dead note” property, it seemed reasonable for it to trigger the “muted” playback technique as you will typically want them to play back differently. Some people have in the past made requests for this to trigger a dedicated playback technique instead, but that remains on our backlog for future consideration.
I believe the “Nylon Guitar VX” and “Solid Guitar VX” HALion patches both have a muted/dead note sample. Bear in mind, though, that using a different sample patch will affect the whole channel, so you can’t have some muted notes and some non-muted notes played by the same sampler channel at the same time.
Thanks for the info. So it does sound like an hoc thing to some extent. So for instance, I don’t see a way for a user to map notehead type to a Playing Technique (by adding “Notehead” to “glyph” and “text” in the Playing Techniques dialogs), except for Percussion Playing Techniques when editing a percussion kit. Correct? If so, I’m having trouble understanding the design decisions, because the dead note guitar situation is exactly when you would want to do this, and guitar is not a percussion instrument. (I get your point about tab notation but I don’t use that so it is irrelevant to me)
A related question comes up when it comes to rolls and steel pans which I mentioned but I will create a separate post about that.