Is NotePerformer 5 intentionally designed to sound notes outside an instrument’s written range during playback and live MIDI input, whereas HALion keeps those notes silent? I have an 88 key digital piano as my MIDI input, and can get flute notes/sounds from each note. This goes with every other instrument, including the timpani. It’s pretty daft to say the least.
If a Wallander rep ever reads this, please reply to explain why notes below or above any given instrument’s range is produced, or explain how to fix/alter this somehow. Thanks
Why alter it, range is very depended on player level. Others complain that Halion can’t play the high trumpet notes. Just set this in the View menu, and you’ll see which notes are out of range. To me, it’s one of the nice things about NP.
Thank you @Jesele. I’m aware of the ‘notes out of range’ feature - I guess I just didn’t understand why I was getting a C1 on the flute (my MIDI keyboard is a full size digital piano). But to add to thins - is there a way of changing the color of the red to a blue instead> I’m color blind …
Thanks @hrnbouma. I spent a while with AI and that’s the conclusion it arrived at. The playback engines I’ver always used (Garrison/Aria on Finale and now Dorico with HALion) always stuck to recognized ranges, which I get is flexible going higher, but pretty silly going lower - ie. C4 is a flute’s lowest note, G3 is the violin’s etc., so why make out there are more notes below?
It’s not a question of recognized ranges – it’s which pitches the VST maker decided to sample from a live musician. As others have noted, there are some perfectly playable pitches which some libraries don’t include.
NotePerformer’s sounds are largely modeled rather than sampled, so there’s no limit to the pitches the library can produce. But as others have said, no one is making you use these “impossible” pitches – you can just stick to what you want your musicians to play.
It depends on what you are doing. Perhaps they are all mapped lower (higher) than possible as they create a “sound”. Not everyone using Dorico is using it for print/PDF for real musicians to play (for example creating soundscapes, using synth VSTs, as well as traditional real instrument sounds). Having NotePerformer able to play specific pitched notes out of “normal” range could be useful for anything, blending into whatever is desired (or imagined).
BTW a normal flute can have a “B-foot” so it can play B below the “standard” C4.
And detuning a violin can sound lower than the G. (Same with lowering guitar, cello, basses strings etc.)
It’s the proper General MIDI Standard to ‘at least’ run something like the full range of an 88 key keyboard for every sound/patch/instrument in the device.
If you were to download a GM or GM2 file of a huge score, I.E. The Planets, it’s likely the arranger did a lot of channel sharing to get all the parts to fit in, and in some spots might have even had to leave some bits out or swap to some ‘doubled instrument patches’! If you imported such a file into Dorico, NP or Sonic Selection could probably play it back, straight away, while Sketch, HSO, and most of the other fancy orchestral plugins with ‘limited ranges’ would choke (HSO does have some combis that stack things for playing GM files, but you have to know about them, where they are, and how to use them, and you still might get some dead notes…I.E. HSO Tuba could stand to go a few notes lower; or, if you try a piece with pedal tones, or super squealer high notes for any of the brass instruments).
So, if a sound is GM compliant, it’s going to be more full ranged.
Again, for flexibility. Imagine you wish you to make a true GM complaint file. A GM SMF file is restricted to 16 channels. Now imagine your score has more like 24 staves/instruments. At this point one would need to get ‘creative’ and combine like/family instruments into the same MIDI channels.
If all of the acro string instruments run the full range of ‘all string instruments combined’, I could do things like having Violin and Viola staves share the same ‘violin’ or ‘viola’ channel (then do the same for string sections, thus cutting it back from 8 or 9 channels to 2). If I’m really tight on channels, I could even have everything from Violin to Basses use the same instrument on the same channel. While this won’t be ‘ideal’, and sound quality might suffer a bit, at least it yields an option to share all of the arco solo strings on a single MIDI channel, and all of the arco section strings on a second channel. With common string articulations like pizzicato involved, it’s a good idea to have a special channel reserved just for these articulations. If you don’t have enough channels for this, then it’s pretty common when making GM files to move things to channels of instruments that are ‘resting’ at that time, use PC to change sounds, then change it back when done with the special articulation. I.E. If no solo strings are playing at the moment, have section strings share that channel for pizzicato. Still, the point is that if you’re trying to compress everything down into a 16 channel GM compliant file, having plenty of range for each orchestral instrument (regardless of name, the waveforms will be ‘similar’) is very helpful.
Same with the flutes…One could eventually modify the score to have the entire ‘flute family’ share a common channel and ‘flute’ instrument. Again with the double reeds, then again with clarinets, brass, and so forth.
Note: Doing this channel merging technique with NP might require tweaking a copy of the NP expression map first, AND cleaning up the exported MIDI files a good bit to make sure they are truly GM compliant, but it would give a decent starting point to pull into a different editor and do a few transformations and clean ups. I.E. One would need to change some of the Program Change events, make sure expression data is converted to CC11, and perhaps convert or remove some of the other CCs into something more responsive in a straight GM player.
If most of the instruments have a pretty full ‘range’ embedded, musicians can also get creative and make instruments of our own by doubling and combining staves. I.E. Emulate different pipe organ stops by combining things like actual flutes, violins, brass instruments, etc, and piping them through different VST effects. You might be surprised how authentic you can get in crafting somewhat realistic pipe and theatre organ sounds doing things like this.
I’d say it’s a feature; not a bug. Personally, I’d rather have too much than too little – this way you’re not running the risk of getting silence if you decide to feature any extended techniques in your writing e. g. violin passages over the fingerboard or a transcription of one of many super high squealing jazz trumpet solos, which most of the sample libraries out there don’t support.
Personally, I’d rather have too much than too little – this way you’re not running the risk of getting silence if you decide to feature any extended techniques in your writing e. g. violin passages over the fingerboard or a transcription of one of many super high squealing jazz trumpet solos, which most of the sample libraries out there don’t support.