I am new to Dorico, coming form Finale. I’m learning a lot of techniques but finding some things hard to figure out and could use some help. My current issue is getting a saxophone to sound like a saxophone (or other instrument to sound like that instrument). So far the saxophone sound sounds like an early cheap Casio synthesizer, and other instruments have other problems (e.g., way too much sustain, so that the attack on notes can’t be heard). There are several sample scores that came with Dorico when I got it, and the playback of those scores sounds great. Exploring the individual instrument sounds in those files has not, so far, shown me how to achieve similar sounds in my own scores. I’m hoping someone can point me to instructions on how to either get better sounds, or how to edit the sounds to my liking.
I’m also having trouble with the nomenclature. I understand how “instrument” is used in setting up a score, but “endpoint” still eludes me.
Saxophones are, in my opinion, a weak point for both Dorico’s native Halion, or NotePerformer if you use that. Very synth-y. I am not sure if you heard any sample scores with saxes in particular that sounded good, or if you mean more general orchestral scores. If you are able to share references to those scores it might be easier to point you in the direction of what they are using for playback, since there are endless ways of customizing this.
Endpoints are a way of connecting playing techniques (front-end) to playback techniques (back-end) to specific instruments in a consolidated way which then allows you to more easily load them into custom playback templates. You can read more about them here:
Thanks for the reply. The VHorns sound fairly good, but I don’t know that I want to spend $220 just for saxophone sounds. I’m using Dorica (and Finale) for notation, and the playback is only to hear what I’m writing, not to make something that can be released commercially, but I’d like it to sound reasonably like the instruments I’m using. Between the time I initially posted and when I saw your reply I did play around with loading different sounds, but I don’t really know what I’m doing in the Halion Sonic window and haven’t found a user manual for it yet. I’ve never understood MIDI very much and have always thought in musical terms rather than programming language. In Finale I was mostly using GM instruments and some Garritan—and was generally happy with the results—so I’ll see if I can set things up that way. Still figuring out how to assign sounds to instruments in the score. Thanks again for your reply.
You can use the Garritan sounds in Dorico, the Aria Player is available. I have the Jazz and Big Band library and with a bit reverb the sound is pretty good. The built-in Garritan Instruments for Finale is actually a subset of the whole anthology.
Sure thing, and understandable. Still keep an eye out around Black Friday, they do good sales and I would say it has been a pleasure to write with because they are incredibly agile and require almost no technical effort, freeing me to focus on writing, and therefore less distracting than wonky or synthetic playback found in Halion etc.
In any case hopefully you can get sorted with the Garritan instruments!
I find saxophones that ship with HALion usable, but I don’t think Dorico has expression maps to fully utilise them. And also, saxes in the templates are not properly mixed at all. Dorico simply loads default HALion programs with all the effects thrown in.
If Garritan saxophones sound like in the video bellow, then HALion saxes are significantly better.
I did see somewhere that I could use Garrison sounds but what I haven’t learned yet is how to apply them or whether it is possible to apply them globally (within a file/flow etc.). Same with GM sounds. My current project is a big band chart that I set up using the Big Band template. Once the file is set up, can I change the sounds applied to each instrument in the Setup tab in the file? So far I’ve only seen instrument editing buttons in the Play tab. I just opened the file, and after the score loaded, the HALion Sonic window opened. Can I change sounds there?
Thanks for all the help. Dorico does seem much more robust than Finale, but I’m still not used to where to find various things.
