The issue seems to be:
First note of a legato phrase (say with slur marks over it) should NOT be played legato. Subsequent notes under the slur SHOULD be legato (including the last note of the slurred phrase).
Oddly, Dorico is assigning the legato event at the first tick of the first note in the slur, and letting it go when it plays the last note under a slur. Because of this the first note of the phrase is played legato (and it really shouldn’t be), and the last note living under the slur doesn’t get the legato attack as expected.
Example: 4 quarter notes living under a slur.
Dorico plays them
da da da ta
When they should be
ta da da da
My personal fix for instruments that use the legato pedaling method are:
- Don’t use legato in expression maps at all. Remove them from the expression maps, period. Instead, set an extended length for legato in Dorico’s default play back parameters. For most things this works out fine, as setting a note length for legato notes longer than 100 creates a little overlap or crossfading effect for legato/slurred passages using the nat/ord sound (the traditional general MIDI method of doing legato).
In cases where I really want a substitute legato sound, I’ll force them in manually using some method other than Dorico’s built in legato technique.
-
When using HALion instruments, I have HALion 6, so I’ve built myself lua scripts that can delay the pedal CC (or key-switch, or whatever triggers the articulation change) a few milliseconds. This fixes it…both for the first note of the phrase, and the last.
-
When using something besides HALion…such as Garritan Personal Orchestra, I’ll host it in an instance of bidule. Bidule allows me to delay the CC (and/or keyswitch) involved in selecting the legato articulation a few milliseconds. It also delays the release event sent by the expression map, so the last note under the slur is also played legato.
-
Another possibility is to compose as you normally would, disable your visible slurs, then add new slurs that begin and end a note later than they should, and hide them. Royal pain, but it would work.
In short…
If you have a way to delay Dorico’s native legato event a bit, your legato articulations triggered via the “legato” technique in expression maps will work well. If not, then you’ll get some odd results when trying to use the built in legato techniques via expression map. At least that has been my experience.
Quite a few of my instruments use the legato pedaling method (CC68, or CC64).
So for me at least…I either don’t use Dorcio’s native legato technique at all in expression maps…or…use scripts, or bidule to intercept the relevant pedal event(s) (or key-switches) and delay them a bit.