I have an orchestral score from a typical template. I set several of the instruments to play using the same VST instance and slot. If I mute one of these instruments, then they are all muted.
I assumed each channel strip (for each instrument) would be independent (i.e. Dorico would simply not send MIDI from that player). They’re not, somehow they are coupled. That’s odd.
Is it possible to un-couple these, so that I can mute one player (one channel strip) while having other players unmuted, in this situation of having them routed to the same VST?
I would ‘expect’ that the channel strip sits above everything else, as a mixing board does, and therefore be able to independently control mute/solo of each and all strips thus each and all instruments; not magically link them because of some arbitrary underlying mechanism which happens to route MIDI communication output to the same MIDI channel. If I routed the MIDI to the same external (hardware) MIDI device (ex. piano keyboard), I would also expect the channel strip to be able to mute each players’ instruments independent of each other.
This VST is SFZ. It does not seem to have program slots/channels. Actually the situation is worse. There is only 1 channel strip shown in Dorico for all the players assigned to the instance, the one shows is named for the most recently added player. There are no channel strips for the other players in the mixer (Show: Instruments).
So thus it seems the workaround is to have to create a dozen instances of the VST, then the one-to-one mapping to each player, in order to gain the ability to have a channel strip, and thus be able to mute each player independently. Rather than, simply add 1 instance, all Players assigned to that instance, with channel strips still being available for each player. So, Dorico’s current handling of routing/mixing seems upside-down/backwards.
When using the SFZ player one needs a separate instance for each independent voice, unlike its “cousin,” the Aria Player which provides slots for 16 different instruments/sounds in each VST instance.
If the message to SFZ is to play a muted sound, the SFZ player can only play that sound until instructed otherwise. The limitation is not with Dorico; it is with the SFZ Player.
At least this explains why muting/soloing hasn’t reduced CPU, when I have tried using it for that purpose (in a big orchestral score). Seems like an area for improvement: if a player’s instrument (via channel strip) is muted, why send the MIDI data to the VST thus use system resources? Maybe there is some underlying MIDI reason for this, but it seems wasteful.
It doesn’t seem proper that a channel strip should ‘disappear’ simply because multiple instruments are assigned to the same instance and the VST only has 1 output, since ideally the audio would be copied into different individual channel strips, for independent control. I see this would be an unusual case… and… maybe not proper from typical VST setup… however in some cases I have, temporarily, reassigned different player instruments or Sketch instruments to a single VST (i.e. to some general piano, or The Grand which also has only 1 program) in order to verify some harmony (as piano is easier to hear harmony mistakes), and then switch it back to the usual instrument later. Maybe all this explains why sometimes these assignments do not work as expected.