I have been trying to create a classical orchestra playback template in Dorico 4 using the Orchestral Tools Orchestra.
I’m hitting a couple of issues which I haven’t managed to solve
Even though I have assigned an instrument in the VST section, with correct MIDI channels and then assigned the instrument to the TRACK inspector, the different instruments can be heard when you play them, but they do not appear on the mixer - except in the REVERB channel and the output.
sometimes one of the instruments displays randomly in the right channel on the mixer - I can’t see any difference between it and the others.
Orchestral Tools uses the SINE Player - a new instance is created for each instrument.
I tried using the Dorico Orchestra template using HALION instruments and pretty much hit the same problem.
Any help much appreciated. I would like to ditch using a DAW and have DORICO scoring working with playback and mixing on the orchestral projects if possible.
Maybe this is another thread, and point 1 above is the main issue for me, but I find the dreaded bouncing ball is visible much more in Dorico playback mode than it is in my DAW (Logic) when using the same set of samples
One issue with this that I’ve noticed is that unless you are using channel 1 in an instance, Dorico doesn’t create the Mixer channel. For example, my Playback Template has an Endpoint Setup of a VEP instance with 6 saxophones in it, SAATTB, on channels 1-6. If I just have an Alto on channel 2, so channel 1 for the Soprano isn’t being used, Dorico doesn’t create the Mixer slider, even though the return signal still sounds fine. For this reason, I basically try to ignore Dorico’s mixer and do my mixing in VEP. (I always turn off Dorico’s reverb and compression too.)
For the Alto Sax example, if the Endpoint Setup in my Playback Template looks like this …
The Alto Sax channel slider is missing, but audio levels during playback still correctly appear in the Reverb and Master sliders. I don’t know any solution to this, other than make sure you are using channel 1 in each instance of the SINE player. If you are using channel 1 and are still missing channel sliders in the mixer, sometimes this just seems a bit buggy and reloading the Playback Template will fix it.
Hi Fred,
Thanks for the response. Good tip about keeping each instance at channel 1. That helped. Thank you.
I have also started assigning a stave to each instrument rather than using 2 instruments on a stave with different voices and the n using the Condense function to put them together in score view.
I use multiple channels, and I get the different instruments properly in the Dorico mixer though I don’t have SWAM… There is an extra step that I miss sometimes of making sure that I’ve changed the output of the VST to a different audio channel other than its stereo default. Works that way for any of the multi- instrument VST I have.
The system also seems to assume that Midi channel 3 will correspond to audio channel 3 - so you can get some odd labeling as I recall if you assign the Tenor Sax to midi 4, and return on audio out 2 on for the VST or something.
I’m deadlining so I’ll play around with this tonight, but it seems pretty consistent that if I have multiple instruments assigned to any VEPro instance, Dorico won’t create the Mixer slider unless I have an instrument assigned to channel 1 of that instance. (The actual VSTs assigned in that instance seem irrelevant.) The audio signal returning to the Mixer is unaffected and plays fine, there’s just no slider for it. When there is a slider (so an instrument is assigned to channel 1) the slider is labeled the name of the instrument assigned to 1, but of course the return audio is for that entire VEPro instance, no matter how many instruments are assigned to different channels in that instance.
I just tried this, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. Do you think changing the output from VEPro should have an effect on whether the Dorico slider shows or not? I was assuming Dorico creates the Mixer sliders based on an output signal, not input, and if there’s no channel 1 out, then no slider. If you can have a VEPro instance connected without using channel 1, and still have a slider in the Mixer, I would definitely love to see exactly how you have that set up!
EDIT: If all of your Dorico instruments are assigned to the Str. Concertino instance, do any of the faders other than the Channel 1 instrument actually do anything? Or are they assigned to different instances? For me, if I have a brass section of 4 trumpets and 4 trombones, and have the Endpoint Setup set to show all of them, then none of the faders other than the instrument assigned to channel 1 actually do anything, although they all play back fine. When that brass section is playing back, VEP looks like this, with activity on all 8 instruments …
Only the channel 1 instrument fader shows any activity, other than the Output fader. As a result, there’s not really any need to show any of the other faders, so I usually have the Endpoint Setup set to just show 1. Where I think I was wrong above (sorry @richard.gonski) was that I had forgotten that I had specified in the Endpoint Setup to only have 1 fader, as only 1 works, but if the working fader isn’t on channel 1, then the functioning fader won’t appear in the Mixer.
Notice how in your VEP that they all output to “1 Master” ? So VEP is sending everything on just one audio channel back to Dorico.
Versus on my VEP, notice how they are all different: the first outputs stereo to “out1/out2”, the second one to “out3/out4”, the next to “out5/out6”, and so on? So on my VEP I am sending many channels of audio back to Doico, and yes they show up separately on the correct Dorico faders for me. Apologies that I didn’t screenshot levels during playback.
First thing I do in VEP is delete the master channel, unless I really do want just one audio output for some reason. That help?
YES!!! I’m kind of embarrassed how long I’ve had this configured this way without realizing there was a much better way to have set this up. Thanks for the help!!!
