Handbell LV - can't get it to work

Dorico
1

I’m a Finale refugee, having used it for 23 years. I’m struggling to get a good handbell LV that affects playback. I had mentioned this before in a forum question and was given a thing to try but I can’t get it to work.

In handbells the LV symbol means to let vibrate, similar to the laissez vibrer used in other instruments. The bells are allowed to continue to sound until a later designation indicates they are to be damped. There are subtleties I’ll save for later. I first want to get the basic thing to work.

The answer in my previous forum question was to look into Library > Playing Techniques. I adapted the l.v. technique for use as LV.

I created an LV popover at the first note I wanted sustained. The “LV” appeared in the score. But it had no effect on playback. I deleted it.

I read a bit more in the manual and saw I should add “->” to get the popover to affect more than one note. I started a popover and selected “lv” from the list, which didn’t give me time to enter the arrow. I cleared that LV. In another popover I entered all of “LV->”. It gave me a popover showing “l.v.” which is not the handbell standard. It also had no effect on playback.

I currently have a piano sound on that staff (worthy of another question). I tried entering a piano sustain pedal marking. That worked, though the piano sound fades so quickly its effect on sustain is minimal, though it is different from no sustain.

How do I get an LV marking that affects playback? Doing so is important to my composing process in answering the question of whether LV is appropriate for a passage.

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2

I’m not sure if LV gets sent to whatever is making the sound. However, you can adjust the playback duration in the Key Editor panel. Check out Played vs. notated note durations to learn how adjust playback without affecting the notation.

3

I believe laissez vibrer doesn’t normally have a playback effect in Dorico out of the box.

I wonder if you can make an l.v. marking that actually triggers a sustain pedal playback effect. Sustain pedal normally triggers MIDI CC 64 with a high value for pedal down and low value for pedal up. However, Dorico seems to do this for pedal markings even in the absence of an expression map involving CC64, so presumably how it handles this controller is outside of the expression map system. Maybe the playback technique “Sustain pedal” might trigger this, but I’m not sure.

4

The way I did LV in Finale was to create expressions that changed the value of MIDI CC 64. Do you have suggestions on how to do that or other possibilities within Dorico?

5

If you edit the expression map being used for that channel, you could probably add your l.v. technique to that with a high CC64 setting, and add a similar one for damp with CC64 set to 0. As long as Dorico doesn’t prevent the expression maps from affecting CC64, it should probably work.

6

I don’t know if this is of any use but when creating an Lv line for harp I use a pedal sign (as you would do for piano) and change the start symbol to ‘lv’. It plays back as you’d expect then.

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