Marching Tenors

I write a lot for marching percussion. I am trying to get a playback sound that will work with the tenor drums, but nothing seems to be available on Halion Sonic SE2. I don’t have the technology to create my own sounds at this time. I don’t even need a great sound; I’d take temple blocks at this point. Please help!!!

Welcome to the forum. Have you considered buying Tapspace Virtual Drumline 2? I think it’s pretty much the only game in town when it comes to marching percussion, and it can be used with Dorico. Dorico even includes basic percussion maps for the main drumline instruments so that you can be up and running quickly.

To pay for so much nice, well-functioning programmable features, I am fairly disappointed that there are so few preset playback options. Here in the US, we have marching bands in every town in every state. I love coming up with parts for them to play, but I like to work on them and get feedback on how it will sound as I work. I wish the answer wasn’t “hey buy this other program.”

I am happy with much of the program, but I wish there were far better options for HalSonic’s library. I don’t have a lot to spend on more products every time something is inadequate.

I do understand, and I’m sorry that my answer isn’t what you wanted to hear. As you probably know, marching percussion is not a big thing here in Europe and as such it’s not necessarily something that’s either easy for us to record and program or indeed something that European users tend to need, hence it has not necessarily been a priority for the HALion team generally over the years. We have not done any specific recording or even licensing of samples for Dorico to date – it just uses the sounds that Steinberg as a whole has available. However, I do understand that it would obviously be preferable for Dorico to have some marching percussion sounds built-in, and we’ll definitely think about how we could accommodate this in the future.

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Indeed, while I have no need for it, I’ll echo the fact that such sounds would be advantageous to include. Every single high school (secondary school) and even some middle schools in even the smallest of towns has a band that performs at every (American) “football” game. This will undoubtedly affect many users in the US.

Acobb, if it is any consolation, there are many of us who are underserved by stock sounds as well. You are hardly alone. This is not a fault of Dorico; every program suffers from it in one way or another. True confession: I set my default sound settings to “silent”. It’s not even worth my time for the majority of what I do.

Truth be told, it is pretty much part and parcel with notation programs that you’ll have to find other sounds if you want to do anything serious (or migrate to a daw to create nicer renders). It’s a little bit like knowing you’ll need to swap out tires on a car eventually. There may be tires that come with the car, but they won’t last the life of the vehicle and certainly wont be to everyone’s taste since they are simply bundled with the car out of necessity and are often cheaper quality. Nicer tires / specialty tires / other accessories… those are all up to the vehicle owner. That is why sound banks are such big business and there are oodles to choose from.

I’ll also add to Daniel’s suggestion that if you have another notation program that has adequate sounds, you should be able to use those sounds as well although you’ll have to configure them yourself.

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You can use Finale’s bundled Garritan Instruments for Finale library with Dorico, which does have a good range for US-style bands.