Hello,
I loaded various techniques of an instrument in an instance of UVIworkstation.
Total 17 instruments are loaded inside of the UVIworkstation.
From instrument 1 to 16 are loaded in port A (channel 1 to 16), and the 17th instrument is loaded in the channel 1 on port b.
I would like to enable to change the port number and channel using “Playing technique” text.
How could I do?
I would like to explain what I did with “bisbigliando”.
Clicking bisbigliando under Common in Playing Technique panel.
Clicking Edit Icon.
Clicking Edit button on “Playback playing technique”.
Clicking + button.
Changing text in the Name field to “UVI bisbigliando”.
Set Alias for (Unset).
Set Group to Techniques.
Set Fallback to (Unset)
Set Articulation type to Direction (<- is it correct?)
Then, I tried to the following in Expression Map Window:
Making a new Group “UVI Harp”.
Adding new Techniques and Actions by pressing + button
Selecting “UVI bisbigliando”.
Adding “Program Change”.
Playing a Flow, but step 4 does not affect.
Erasing “Program Change” and adding “Absolute Channel Change Action”.
Apologies if I haven’t fully understood everything you wrote. Playback playing techniques are definitely an area where pictures help clarify!
If I’m reading your post correctly, I fear you might be unwittingly making this a bit more complicated than it has to be. I’ve heard that Nuendo is similar to Cubase; if that’s true then you are already familiar with the basics of Expression Maps? I think what you’re trying to accomplish is set in the xMap rather than in the playing technique editor. This way, even if you have several harps from several different companies, you will only need one “bisbigliando” technique … but each instrument will need its own xMap so the correct MIDI instructions will be sent. So for instance, one instrument might have an xMap that basically says “when I ask for bisbigliando, use channel 4” and a different instrument could have an xMap that says “when I ask for bisbigliando, use Key Switch C1.”
Note that in the xMap, you’ll need to set up the “whisper” technique (in xMaps they use the English translation for some reason even though it’s usually notated in Italian).
From what I can tell, you can’t currently change MIDI port by xMap, only the channel. So I’m not sure how you’ll get your 17th UVI instrument to integrate with the first 16. (Unless you can find some combination of channel switching, program change, KS, etc.? I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with UVI, but if UVI can be configured in all those ways on a per-instrument basis, you might be able to get all 17 instruments into the same xMap by a hybrid approach.)
If, however, you’re trying to create the “UVI bisbigliando” technique because you’re combining several libraries to fill gaps, thus they all need to be triggered from the same xMap (for instance, to specify “UVI bisbigliando” as opposed to “Halion bisbigliando”) … then I believe in Engrave → Edit Playing Techniques, you could create something such as:
In this example, I don’t think you need to set an Alias. I believe “Direction” is correct here, as if I’m not mistaken, the instruction applies until cancelled by “normale” (or by several bars rest and a new context, in which case a human wouldn’t need instruction, but Dorico will need a hidden “natural” playing technique).
Re: key switches not working, are they by any chance velocity-sensitive keyswitches? If so, please see this thread:
This temporarily stopped working in 3.0 but will be fixed in the next update.
If I’ve completely wasted your time because I misunderstood what you’re aiming for … then my apologies, and please post some pictures so we can help figure it out.
FWIW: I did a channel switching test using only Custom Playing Techniques and found that whenever a custom technique contradicts or duplicates “Dorico’s built-in knowledge” the base channel will overrule the Xmap. It seems that Dorico knows about natural, legato and staccato e.g. even when those techniques are not present/defined in the Xmap…
(Also, every custom playing technique still needs an ord. or nat. in front of them in order to work … should the new mutual exclusion mechanism take care of that, perhaps…? )
On and on this goes…as I encounter various issues I can often over-ride them with combi playing techniques.
Sometimes it’s easier to throw in a nat/ord and start fresh, but sometimes it’s better to just build those combis.
I.E. You can use the sticky techniques (directions that don’t go away until you drop a nat, arco, or ord. etc…) to control if you want staccato, spiccato, martele, sautellie to be used on a regular basis until such time as you ‘add’ some more ‘sticky techinuqes’ or ‘take some away’. Thus, you don’t necessary have to go in and individually mark up every single note with a staccato mark for shorter living under slurs (say a martelle or sautelli stroke) independently of the ones not living under slurs (where you might want staccato or spiccato).
In short, combi techniques are your friend.
The little ‘status line’ in the play tab helps sort out what you need when and where. If they show a little astrix…that means there’s more than one technique going on there with an entry in your expression map. Hover the mouse over it and a pop up will list them all.
Here’s one that over time has something like 100 entries. Obviously it didn’t start out this massive. I’ve gradually added to it as each score called for different things. Just one set of 15 techniques visible here…but there are quite a lot…much of it I did with theoretical templates in an XML editor before hand with an oddball technique name…so I can later just go in and activate them as needed. Why? I send about 12 cc parameters with each one to shape the sound in real time…I’ve got some basic shapes all ready to go…easy to tweak things to fit as I need them.
Or sprawled out in the table mode of an XML Editor it looks like this…
You can also see that I have some oddball stuff typically for brass or percussion down in the exclusion area…why would that stuff be used on a violin section stave? Trust me, I hide it from view…but most of those are what I call ‘sticky’ directions…thus I can stack various combination of them to get a broader range of articulations at my fingertips…note…alot of the so called ‘articulations’ are based on the same sound…but I throw in cc Events to alter ADSR, Notch Filters, and more. All depends on your library of course…but again, the point is how you can build combi techniques…
Note…there may be times when it’s more convenient to just do key-switches and stuff from something like a dummy tuba stave, or maybe a grand staff that you’ll hide later. You could even build custom percussion sets/staves to drive them (might be worth it if you have some fancy organ or harp plugin with a zillion options…dealing with virtual stops, pedals, and more…send all those ‘commands’ through a separate stave…dot the key switches in manually, send CCs through the controller lanes, etc.). Simply make a controller stave and point it to the same end-point as the stave hosting your primary stave (the one you want to display and print)…draw your key-switches and elaborate CC curves and stuff in that custom ‘play-back’ stave. You can hide it from engrave and page view, while keeping it showing in the galley view.
As for the problem of bouncing across more than one MIDI port…for now, you’d need to cut and paste things to a new instrument stave, or use third party ‘host in host’ apps like Bidule, VEP Pro, Akai’s VIP, etc. Or, if all you need to send to alternate ports are commands for things like key-switching, pedaling, etc…you could do just that stuff from an independent stave that you’ll later hide as described above.
Something like Bidule still limits you to 16 channels at a time from a single Dorico stave end-point, but from a single end-point, it does allow you to connect up more than one plugin, or have multiple connections to instruments with more than one MIDI input port to a single end point, or even route stuff off into another plugin hosted elsewhere (via virtual ports, or through OSC protocols).
Brian,
Dorico ought to construct a central home from which to link to many of your posts on different topics. Over the past couple of years, I have been truly impressed by how your deep knowledge enables you to show ways to make the best, most extensive use of the capabilities Dorico provides. Your explanations are clear and your diagrams are very helpful. I’d like to think that, when I have time to investigate Dorico playback in such depth, I will be able to find my way back to your many helpful posts.
Maybe I misunderstood your reply, but anyways, I’ll try to rephrase my initial concern.
Say you want to construct a channel switching Xmap for a single violin with a midi base channel of 1,consisting of ONLY custom techniques. Your score contains the normal slurs, but you want them to trigger a special kind of legato that lives on Midi channel 7. So you make a PT named LEGalt, and reference it in the Xmap. That’s all fine. HOWEVER, Dorico, even if no ordinary legato technique is present in this Xmap, will still interpret the slurs as “ordinary” slurs, and overrule your Channel 7 with the instrument Base Channel 1…
This was the result of my initial channel switching Xmap tests, so I have to dig somewhat deeper into it before I start complaining
I second Derrek’s thanking of Brian for continuing to share his wisdom and experience with us. I’ve learned a lot from him already, though unfortunately in my case, I always end up comprehending only a fraction of what he shares. So this might just illustrate the depth of my learning curve, but here goes FWIW:
It sounds like you’ve definitely already tried it both with and without an ordinary legato technique in the xMap, but have you tried it with a combined technique such as ‘legato+LEGalt’ and it still overrules what you’re asking for?
This is an area I really want to dive into once I can actually get things to run properly on my machine, and hearing the results of what you’ve already mucked with will definitely save me some hours of confusion, so I appreciate any more details you can provide. Thanks!
Make a combi playing technique in Xmap
legato+LEGalt
I just ran a brief test in Dorico 3, and custom techniques are working but for some reason they are NOT showing up in the technique status line in play mode. While it shows the * letting me know multiple techniques are active, it doesn’t list my LEGalt.
So…
If you have not already, set up a custom playing technique for LEGalt and place it at very start of your score.
Establish it as a ‘direction’. This makes the playback node ‘sticky’. In other words, the LEGalt flag will stick until you enter a Nat. Ord.
For now do NOT put this technique in any of the exclusion groups.
Make a playing techniqe in your Xmap
legato+LEGalt
After doing all this, you should find that Dorico plays back your LEGalt sound. It will keep doing so until you put a nat. or ord. on the stave (which should remove all your ‘sticky’ directions on the stave, and you can get a fresh start from that point forward).
While LEGalt doesn’t show up in the status line of the Play tab for me, it does seem to be ‘working’ as expected for me.
Be aware that Dorico currently sends the technique on the same tick (or maybe a tick before) the first note of a slur, and seems to hold it until the end of the last note under a slur.
Here in the forum Dorico Staff have stated they are working on giving us more options on how legato will be implemented in the future.
Personally, the way it is now leads to a problem, in that I don’t want legato to be engaged until after the first note of the slur has sounded.
One way to get around this is to add a triple combi playing technique of some sort to override the first note of your slurred passages. Tag the first note of all of your slurred passages with it (you can hide it later if it’s in the way visually).
I.E.
Downbow+Legato+LEGalt
I know of some other kludges to automatically deal with the issue, but they would not work with native Dorico Channel Bouncing. They’d require some method other than channel bouncing, and the ability to delay specific incoming events in your target plugin.
The way I currently handle it is to host my instruments in Bidule, and delay the specific event that invokes legato (Usually cc68, or sometimes a Program Change, or key-switch. If channel bounces are involved, I’ll use program changes instead, and have bidule to the ‘delayed’ channel bouncing for the hosted instruments).
Another way is when using HALion sounds…I’ll load them in H6, and drop in a Lua script to delay the legato triggering event(s).
Gentlemen,
I’m well familiar with combination techniques, but that is beyond my point… which simply is that I think Dorico should IGNORE techniques that are not part of the Xmap.
I didn’t pay close attention to who was posting what.
I mistook your more recent post that voices ‘the concern’ as coming from the OP (prko) to express that he didn’t understand and could not get an over-ride for pt.legato working. Oops.
I know the first time I tried using custom playing techniques, I thought maybe they had not been wired to actually ‘work’ in the playback engine yet…as they were not showing up in that status line on the play page. It took me a moment to figure out that they were indeed working.
Yes, I very much agree about the legato pt.node. PaulWalmsey informed me that getting the Legato thing more flexible is something the Dorico team is very much looking into. I got the idea that it’s getting more attention than a simple band-aid fix or brute force change…as in they are modeling various ideas on ways handle it.
I suspect that legato and slurs will ALWAYS be marked in some way in the playback engine (even if you don’t assign something in the Xmap). Why? In the playback options/preferences, one can establish legato note duration. I.E. If you want legato notes to overlap a little, you can enter something like 104%. That’s a pretty common way to handle it as it supports the old GM style instruments that typically don’t involve legato and portamento pedals with built in cross-fading effects. It also helps with the more fancy pedaled plugins…as some of those, if in monophonic mode, will automatically engage a legato mode when notes overlap.
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t familiar with combination techniques, and I’m sorry if it came across that way. What I was trying to say is that I am largely unfamiliar with the nuances here, and would appreciate if you could share more details of your experiences so that I might learn. But if you don’t have the time or inclination to share, it’s all good.
I agree that it would be very nice if we could tell Dorico to ignore techniques that aren’t part of the xMap, but I occasionally find it convenient when it doesn’t, so would prefer this not to be a global option – perhaps something like a checkbox in the xMap editor, where this could be set on a case-by-case basis.
In fact there are a mountain of playback-related things that are on my longterm wishlist, which I hope are planned for the not-too-distant future. I don’t want to derail the thread listing them all, but it is essential that all these options and behaviors can be specified on a per instrument, per xMap – and ultimately per articulation/playing technique – basis.
Is this approach valid for playback of multiple instruments from the same staff, for example, the following case:
I have a violin staff in which the violin solo switches from arco to pizzicato and the sample library (EW) only has one key switch version for Legato/sus that doesn’t have pizzicato.
Or maybe this solution: Multiple sounds on one instrument.
