Microtonal tuning with Surge Synth in Dorico

Dorico
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Hello! I am using Surge Synth within Dorico in the context of a microtonal piece using the HEJI system. The microtonal alterations do not seem to work with Surge patches, though they work just fine with HALion instruments. I activated MPE in Surge but it still does not work. Any suggestions for how I can get this to work?

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Welcome to the forum, @fiboribo. Dorico doesn’t yet support MPE, I’m afraid, so it requires plug-ins that make use of the VST “detune” parameter.

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Thank you for your reply. I would imagine this can then be accomplished in Surge since it has a great built in tuning tool. Is there something I need to do in Dorico or Surge to set this up, for instance a certain range I need to set? Perhaps this a question I should also post in a Surge forum :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks again!

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Dorico uses a rarely-implemented VST3 tuning parameter for microtuning. The only third-party VSTis that respond to this parameter are, AFAIK, NotePerformer and Pianoteq. However, we should ask the Surge developers to implement this VST3 parameter. It shouldn’t be complicated to program, and they have been very supportive of microtonalists’ wishes in the past. Similarly, the parameter was implemented in Pianoteq after Dorico users asked the Modartt staff to include it.

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Ditto. The same for SWAM instruments (audio modeling)

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I’ve been asking to VSL and Native Instruments for years, but no chance :frowning:

Paolo

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This does not surprise me. Only small companies and individual developers that are supportive of special interests (such as alternative tunings) respond to users’ wishes. I once reported a bug in the microtuning implementation of a synth by Native Instruments, a bug that appeared in an update of the previously correctly working synth. They acknowledged the bug and gave it a repair code number. After seven years, they (partly) fixed it.

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I contacted the Surge team and asked about VST3 expression parameters. Unfortunately the way Surge is programmed does not allow the implementation of the VST3 parameters at all, so it won’t support Dorico’s microtuning. This may change in the future but apparently not soon.

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Thank you for letting me know. I appreciate everyone’s input!