Here’s a goal: Take a fresh Dorico Pro 3.5 with the bundled Halion Sonic 3 SEs VSTs. Start with playback template HSSE+HSO.
Add tambourine. Let’s say we use Tambourine Combi Key program/instrument, which clearly has a shake sound in B3. Now give me step-by-step instruction on how to get that to playback in normal write mode playing. HSO Tambourine percussion map does not seem to do anything except play the default natural sound.
I was hoping to get some composing done and I’m on verge of a breakdown because of how much time this has taken. All the back and forth and clicking Setup, instrument, caret, edit noteheads, choose techniques in several different ways, see duplicate ones and don’t know which one is which, then try to write it out, then Play and try to figure out how exactly does the program know to call that B3, since I have nowhere seen the link between the note and that midi note, try to remember what you set in the setup dialogue, so close everything and go back there…
The add percussion → call a sound in vst pathway is lateral, it doesn’t obey the otherwise understandable tabs in Dorico. You’re forced to go back and forth in multiple menus with hundreds of clicks and can’t have this flow information in one place. I’ve been up all night anxious for one effing tambourine shake. And this is with the years of experience on Dorico pretty much since it launched. This night was not the first night being stuck in playback. I can certainly start counting those hours very concretely in money and therapy hours.
A story in pictures before I end up making a video where I can’t help myself just getting angry any longer:
Why are there two indistinguishable Shake techniques? Are they hard-coded?
Guitar shake is a thing, but what’s the other one, then? Why can’t the lists differentiate that from other shakes? There is no shake in the unpitched percussion technique tab:
The default, I’d-expect-it-to-work HSO Tambourine percussion map has wrong notes that clash with what are available when you look at the VST:
Okay lemme then just copy the HSO Tambourine map and fix the notes. But choosing that wrong shake roll (is it the Shake, a shake, just a label, what is it?) and pressing Clear does nothing. The line selection just jumps one item up in the list.
Okay, I guess the extra Shake at C5 (which doesn’t exist in the vst) can just be a dummy. C4/normal doesn’t exist either. I’ll just make new entries then for natural and shake. Wait, why do I have to keep telling Dorico that it’s Tambourine for every single line, when I have already chosen above that this is about a single instrument.
Finally, I ca– OH GOD NO
I’ve been searching for answers, googled so much, and best stuff are random forum posts from 2019 (How does mapping work?), and the unintuitiveness people were complaining back then is still here. Read so many manual/documentation pages, which are often out-of-date and I don’t have some of the options they mention (e.g. Edit Playing Techniques dialog). Where’s the border between technique and expression? Which of these are hardcoded? What is that list you need to pick stuff from. Is some hard-coded master list or does it include user-added ones? I have no clue, and then in every dialogue where I have to pick something, I don’t know what I’m looking at. (I remember there being two Open techs for hi-hat and then something else and these were indistinguishable as well, but at least one of them was visible with a glyph and the tooltips told you which one it was. Not here. And is that fixed yet?)
I often feel like Dorico is the worst best program ever. It’s amazing, I praise it to everyone, brings notation and modern DAW working together… but then it just fails at normal-sounding stuff. I really want to love this, but can’t. I just want to play some percussions. I’ve done professional QA especially on UI/UX side before, but I’m losing it with this. The expected workflow is all over the place… I feel bad for being this emotional over it and not able to file proper bug reports and plan proper testing scenarios, but I need this to just please work.
