I have a friend who has switched to Dorico and I’ve been helping him along the way. He does a lot of writing for high school marching bands and drum corps (here in the US). He has been having a major issue with his current score exhibiting very laggy behavior, very inconsistent playback, and very odd behavior regarding instruments.
I am trying to recreate some of his problems in a document of my own. I am attaching that file for other to check out. Here are the most recent issues that have popped up:
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In the score I am attaching, I added a concert snare drum. I want to make some edits to it and save it as a default. When I open the instrument library, snare drum does not show as (in score). It is absent from the list. The same thing happened on my friends computer regarding the suspended cymbal.
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When my friend edits an instrument in the instrument library and stars it (make default for use in other projects), the instrument does not stay. We spent hours (me walking him through what we need to create and why) building suspended cymbal percussion maps, playback techniques, and percussion playing techniques. We did the same for Tam-tam, Swish Knockers, and concert bas drum. Today he goes to load a suspended cymbal, and none of the percussion techniques carried over. It’s the basic suspended cymbal from before. The manual says that if you star the instrument it useable in other projects.
Does anybody have any understanding of what is going on? Deadlines are getting closer and he is trying not to duplicate hours of work for each project.
He is about 55% through his current project and doesn’t have time to sit down and create a template from the file that we did all of the work on.
TIA,
Robby
Drum Corps Template.dorico (2.5 MB)
Ok, we have played around with it some more. Here is what we are seeing.
We are using a file that that already has music in it. We are trying to add one of these new instruments we saved as default. It will not load the new instrument. We open a file from scratch and add one of these new instruments, it shows up without any issue.
Does anybody know what might be going on, and why the original file does not open the saved instrument? It opens a version we are not even familiar with.
Robby
The only thing I noticed which was weird: if you open the Drum Set kit hold by the Drum Set player, then select the snare drum in it and remove it from kit (with the icon) so that it will be outside the kit, the snare drum at the bottom of the player list will now show the Instrument Definition, and will appear as “(in score)”. Once you add the first snare drum back to the kit, the bottom snare drum loses the connection with an instrument definition. Really strange behaviour. Maybe can be the starting point to investigate more.
Here short video with this issue, an me trying to diagnose the cause, in case could be helpful, which I doubt 
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Thanks for digging into that! You are genius for recognizing that!
This helps us trouble shoot a little bit more. And hopefully is putting us on the correct path.
To the Dorico team, aside from other issues regarding percussion kits (such as not being to save an endpoint configuration), perhaps it might be a good idea to name some of the instruments as concert bass drum, concert snare drum, etc. Still only reflecting the name Snare Drum, Bass Drum, etc. but having another layer of subtle difference.
Robby
Ok, after many hours of playing around, here are the solutions.
@Christian_R solved the first issue. Thanks again! You helped to figure out one of the issues holding us back. And in a way got me thinking deeper about the second issue we were hitting. Please watch the video @Christian_R posted above (as long as it is still available - and if it’s gone, his textual description is right on the money.)
The second issue was we could not get Dorico to load the instrument with the correct playing techniques that we had set up in another project, after making it the default.
This issue was because another player was already holding the instrument with the old, out-dated playing techniques (we did not recognize the instrument was around). After deleting the instruments, it still did not load the new default instrument. We had to manually change this.
Since the new default instrument was being overridden by the projects existing, we had to go into the instruments dialog, select the instrument and press the turning arrow to restore to default. And this fixed the issues.
Robby
