I see I can select a note or notes and then in the properties panel select “suppress playback” - is this the only way to mute a note?
I often find myself selecting a group of notes to effectively “solo” those instruments temporarily whilst trying different notes - or having to switch to the mixer to mute a particular instrument.
It’d really useful to be able to select a group of notes, key command to mute them AND have those notes displayed in some way as muted, either greyed out or coloured in some way.
Is there a trick I’m unaware of? In Studio One midi editor for example I can Shift-M and mute (and grey out) notes in a second. Making alternate composition choices is really quick and efficient.
With “suppress playback” it’s really easy to lose track of what is muted!
Set the velocity or expression to zero, which is permanent until you set it back to whatever you had before. No DAW I’m aware of has selective playback like you suggest, so it’s pretty cool Dorico does have the “Suppress Playback” (presumably for notation just to be used for, e.g. performance indicators of some kind). The one thing other DAW’s have that Dorico doesn’t AFAIK is “Solo” (mute everything other than this track)
Firstly the Alt-S solo, useful for soloing one complete track and nothing more. I didn’t know about it BUT, having just tried it, my mixer no longer shows up! So I soloed a track, and that worked, but I cannot unsolo it without visiting the mixer, and now that will not open, even though the icon is lit up to suggest it is…I currently cannot play my project with the flute permanently in solo…
But my main point I think none of you got. Say I’m writing a phrase, and I put a little flurry of notes in, but cannot decide whether I like them nor not, so I want to be able to hear them active , and then compare with them muted. A lot of key presses when one drag or select and Shift M or whatever would do it.
And yes Studio One does EXACTLY what I said it does, greyed notes are muted, to unmute, shift-M again, Cubase does this too I think, I’m pretty sure all the major DAWs allow one to select notes (non-contiguous or whatever) and simply mute them. See my quick mock-up from S1 below.
But now I’m stuck without a mixer…I’ve closed the program and re-opened but it simply will not show.
EDIT- I’d closed and re-opened the project but having closed Dorico completely my mixer is back. Bug?
Alt-S solo is useful for soloing one or more instruments.
Solo states can be deactivated in one go from the Play menu.
I’ve never witnessed the mixer disappearing - it strikes me that the likelihood is that the mixer window was hiding behind the main window, and in that instance Window > Mixer (or F2 or whatever) won’t bring the mixer to the front. I may be wrong in your case, of course.
I totally got your main point but didn’t address it. There isn’t a trick you’re missing in Dorico here.
Yeah I also understood your point, and thanks for the correction, Logic (my main DAW) does support individual note muting. I never use it.
Shrug … I think Dorico is doing the right thing. Is it trying to be a full featured DAW? I wouldn’t do that, would turn it into a kitchen sink which is a software maintenance nightmare. And if you accept that, I think the “note suppression” is the right feature for it to have. For example audio recording - a DAW features - doesn’t make sense here. Having said that Daniel I think hinted there is (substantial?) playback improvements coming, so watch and wait.
Thanks Pianola - no it wasn’t hiding behind the main window, I did all the usual (and Cubase which I abandoned years ago is the worst offender for hiding windows…!) trying to reset the workspace etc. Only closing Dorico worked.
Glad I’m not missing anything, will put it as a feature request but it looks as though I’m asking for something that few need. Maybe it’s my rock n roll background - throw a load of notes on the page and see what sticks…! Seriously though, is this a compositional rarity? Do you never add something and wish you could listen with and without - quickly, and without just using undo (because maybe you added several notes in different places, and that would be a lot of CMD zzzz.
And Redtide, I’m not asking Dorico to be a full fledged DAW in any way. But since each note is an event (and they’ve borrowed from Cubase the player mode piano roll) it shouldn’t be a big deal to be able to mute notes. Nothing to do with DAWs, simple compositional choices. And if Note Supress is the only option then each suppressed note needs to be highlighted, for the reasons I said at the beginning. Otherwise note suppress has very limited uses. Imagine suppressing a couple of notes at the start of several bars just to see whether it improved the piece - now ya gotta find them to un-supress! Good luck with that.
I agree entirely with your suggestion – if Dorico had a feature like that, I’d use it all the time. Just now you have the choice of muting notes but not being able to easily see which ones are muted or muting the channel. On the latter, it’s surely much better to do this in the VST where possible. For instance with Vienna Ensemble – at any rate the Synchron libraries I’ve used – the settings simply clash and using the Dorico mixer doesn’t work correctly. You even seem to have lost yours as a result (I’m assuming you looked in the window menu–> mixer to try and tick from there?)
