I am transcribing the great Bill Evans (“alternate take”) recording of his composition Loose Bloose.Bill Evans - Loose Bloose Alternate - YouTube Instruments are piano (Evans); tenor sax (Zoot Sims); guitar (Jim Hall); bass (Ron Carter); drums (Philly Joe Jones). While the main thing is for me to get the instructions to the musicians right, I’d like to also have it play back somewhat convincingly. My current quandary relates to the hi hat. (Yes, apologies, I have asked about this before, but I hope that at least my questions show some learning curve, as I have in fact considered all of the helpful answers; but I’m hoping that as my question continues to be more refined, the answers will get me where I want to be). My experience with Dorico (and any music technology invented since 1985) goes back two weeks. It seems to me that the default music library in Dorico has the hi hat volume “too low.” (recognizing the total subjectivity of that claim). At first I thought it was not playing at all. But I chalk that up to some hearing loss in the upper register due to my age. Others with better hearing concur with me, though, the the hi hat sound is too low (for this tune). I was using a drum kit that include hi hat snare and kick drum. I made some progress by marking every hi hat beat ffff, moving the mixer on the hi hat 3/4 of the way from midpoint up to maximum; which then required me to mark every kick drum beat pp to compensate. But, as you can imagine, this leads a lot of ffff’s and pp’s and takes a lot of time. I was inspired by one helpful suggestion to switch to separate single line notation for the hi hat, snare and kick drum, figuring that would give me more independent control over the volume of the particular instruments as compared to the drum kit. Perhaps it does, but both moving the mixer to max on the hi hat and marking all hi hat ffff still leaves it too quiet. It seems the hi hat sample sound on the stand-alone line is perhaps even quieter than in the drum kit? Is there a simple fix that I am missing? I’ve been trying to avoid getting into any things I have not learned anything about yet (e.g. percussion maps), fearing that will be a 1 month learning curve for me. But if that’s the way I have to do it, so be it. I’m also not super keen to switch to different software or a different sound library entirely. I’m just barely starting to learn this one. Though, again, I could if that’s really necessary. I’m not uploading my project because a gremlin just made it go crazy and I don’t have time to re-restore it right not.
Just confirming, you are using the default Halion sounds, right? Have you tried balancing the kit in the Halion mixer?
Thanks. I’m new to this stuff and didn’t know there was a HALion mixer. Once I got there, at first I could not move the controls. My wife is a designer and apparently the way you operate the mixer knobs is similar to how some things in design software work. Anyway, I put the hi hat on max and now it sounds just right to me.
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