The opposite is true: NP4 has levelled the playing field, allowing Finale, Sibelius and Dorico to produce the same excellent audio output; so anyone pointing to the audio/midi limitations of Sibelius and Finale will just be shown NP4 as ‘the solution’.
Encore 6 is still scheduled for release in “Late Fall 2022”, so… any day now…
It effects pretty much ANY library that triggers a different sound for legato.
The trigger comes at the same time as the first note living under a slur, or some ticks ‘before’ the note. The trigger remains until the end of the ‘next to last’ note in the slurred phrase.
So, if a library isn’t scripted to understand this, it’ll give weird phrasing that doesn’t make sense in the context of most music.
In the case of HALion Symphonic Orchestra (HSO), the legato sound Dorico picks ‘stock out of the box’ is even more strange, as it’s not at the same bow speed as the regular arco sound. It’s not typically what the average composer means to hear when drawing a slur mark over some notes! Slur does NOT mean ‘slow down the bow speed’.
I have 3 different libraries here (plus ZEN, Fantom, and some other keyboards and tone modules), and I have to use hacks to make legato phrasing work, or just remove the legato node all together.
Hack 1: For HSO. I built my own legato sound (modeled with the same sample for arco, but the sound begins at a later point in the sample, and there is a cross fade from the previous note by extending its release time). I have a lua script that ‘delays’ the legato trigger (A CC68 pedal) by a few milliseconds. This way, legato phrases triggered by the expression map make sense again.
Garritan, and East West (Opus, as well as Classic Gold)…
These also need the legato trigger to come AFTER the first note in a legato phrase sounds, and stay active until after the last note in the phrase begins…then be released at some point before that lost note ends. Since users cannot script either of these libraries on their own to make this happen…I use Bidule to capture the CC and/or key-switch event for the legato pedal and delay it a few milliseconds. I can’t have Dorico manage channel bounces for legato on his own or it’s a mess. Again, Bidule (and probably Kushview) can fix that by translating some kind of event to a channel bounce internally if one needs to go that route with a sample library.
Just remove the legato node from the expression map all together. Go into general playback settings, and make legato notes slightly longer in duration (the old General MIDI way). Some libraries also have monophonic patches that give special legato/portamento handling to overlapping notes (if you set them to do so).
It’s like this…
Without such hacks…the phrases are a bit backwards.
Consider a trumpet playing a phrase of several notes tied together by a slur. He should TONGUE on the first note of the phrase (ta), then slur through the rest of the phrase. So it sounds like…
Ta la la la la la
Instead, Dorico interprets it as…
la la la la la Ta
Or in the case of strings…
First note of the phrase should have the bite/attack clarifying it is the first note of the phrase…then the subsequent notes ‘skip’ that attack phase, as if the bow is already at full speed, the player is simply moving fingers on the fretboard, or rolling to a different string with the bow already at full speed/normal pressure.
Currently, the legato trigger comes at the SAME TIME as the first note with a slur over it. The trigger to end the legato happens at the same time (or before if you ask Dorico to put it some ticks before the note) as the last note of the slurred passage, so it gets the improper interpretation of a ‘full attack’.
Not good.
Dorico will allow you to slide an expression map playing technique some ticks ‘earlier’ in time, but in this case, we need to be able to move it ‘later’ in time. Until this happens, legato doesn’t work as intended in quite a lot of libraries…as well as tone modules/keyboards like Montage, Fantom, K2700, Kronos, etc…
There are some other possible hacks for Dorico to get around this issue…but they all require several steps. I.E. Making new player techniques that don’t impact the expression map at all, using those for the ‘visual’ aspect, then drawing in the default playback slur a beat later, then ‘hiding it’. Etc. Royal pain in the rear.
For me it’s not a huge deal, since I can use Lua in HALion, or Bidule to ‘fix’ the problem. Still, it’d be nice if someday we got the ability to put ‘slur, legato, and portamento’ playing techniques so they trigger some ticks ‘after’ the position on the score. They also need to be able to remain ‘open’ (stay in the legato mode) over the last note of that phrase. Again, simply delaying the legato trigger event a few ticks usually gets the job done.
For portamento on some libraries, it might be best to just leave it unbinded in the expression maps, and dot it on a controller lane.
In Big Band libraries…the whole legato thing is even more important I think. So many of these really need more control over where a player technique triggers something. Dealing with slurs, judicious amounts of portamento, wahwah and other fancy mutes, doits, falls, glisses…yeah, thank goodness I have Bidule! It’d be a NIGHTMARE trying to use Dorico with Garritan JABB2 without smoothing out these issues in something like Bidule.
I want to understand what you mean but I think I need an audio example.
When NPPE plays a legato phrase from a library, the first note will be tongued if that’s how the sound was articulated when it was recorded. It’s not something we can change, since it’s a phrase/musical recording.
Here is audio for the huge difference in legato handling I mentioned above.
NP4 native:
NPPE BBC SO CORE:
Wow, this is a nice comparison.
BBCSO really seems to not articulate the first note of each slur.
A lot of musicians play the above passage as though there were one slur over all the notes. That’s not good!
Noticeable to me are the smooth transitions between sections of slurred notes in NP4 vs. extremely shortened last notes in each of the NPPE groupings. Jarring. I wish Dorico had an option to lessen the clipping of final notes in slurred phrases.
Many MIDI tone modules and sample libraries use a CC pedal (Usually CC68) to engage/disengage legato. It changes the ‘attack’ phase of the sound, and creates a kind of cross fade effect into the subsequent note.
Others might simply change to a whole new patch/preset/program/layer upon receiving a key switch.
Some libraries, like East West stuff, can do BOTH at the same time…and different values with that CC pedal can offer ‘variations’ on the legato effect in real time.
Some libraries even somewhat combine legato and portamento with the same controller. I.E. Garritan…CC68 removes the ‘attack phase’, ‘crossfades into the next note’, and allows for an optional portamento effect if a second parameter is set to a value ‘above zero’.
Consider this phrase.
Think of all notes at the beginning of a slurred group as the ‘Ta’ articulation. All other notes in the group as a softer ‘la’ articulation.
Consider the first three notes. They should sound like:
Ta, la, la
The trumpeter literally articulates those consonant/vowel movements of the mouth behind a buzz into the mouthpiece (without using the vocal chords of course).
The black carrots designate where Dorico sends the CC68 pedal to engage and release the legato/slur pedal.
The red carrots are where the pedal on/off events ‘should be’. (Or really…anytime AFTER that note has begun playing…thus the red lines showing it can fall anywhere in that range)
Another example. You want to have a trumpet player start on concert Bb and slur up the scale.
First play the Bb in with the ‘normal’ articulation (full tonguing). Engage the legato pedal BEFORE the next note sound, and HOLD IT DOWN up the rest of the scale. Do not let go of the pedal until AFTER the beginning of the last note has sounded. Now that the pedal is lifted…the instrument is ‘ready’ to play the full tongue articulation again.
Here I use Bidule to capture and delay the CC68 that Dorico sends for a few milliseconds before it gets passed on to a Garritan/JABB2 plugin instance. It is what it SHOULD sound like.
Notice that we get a ‘tongue’ articulation on the first note of slurred phrases. Throughout the rest of the phrase the trumpet uses a lighter da/la sort of attack/articulation, or no tongue at all.
Here is what Dorico does with it without the Bidule/delay hack.
Instead of sounding:
Ta, la, la
It is playing
la, la, Ta
The first notes of each slur group are not articulated with the full tongue. The last note included in slur groups is getting tongued when it should not be.
And here it again as it should be with a little portamento applied as well (to clarify the phrasing). This isn’t a common thing to do for brass, but it is often a desired effect for fretless string instruments to have a bit of ‘pitch-glide’ between notes when slurring.
And again, with a little portamento without hacking a correction to ‘delay’ that legato/portamento trigger. Dorico even causes an unwanted artifact here because it is stomping that legato pedal too soon (it should wait until AFTER that first note in the slur phrase is sounding…as we still want the ‘attack’, but also want the 'crossfade into the next note which will also subsequently play with less attack)!
This ‘unwanted’ legato/portamento behavior would also occur if one were using a key-switched articulation in lieu of a CC event. Or if channel bouncing, or whatever. You typically do NOT want the ‘legato/portamento’ effects applied to the first note in the passage; however, you DO want it to follow through and stay in effect for the beginning of last note in the slurred group, yet release shortly before the next note/phrase begins.
For further comparisons, pop open Dorico Overture. The phrasing is all backwards ‘sounding’ from what is WRITTEN on the page.
Here is a rendering of Dorico playing the Dorico Overture ‘out of the box’.
This is it again with tweaked out HSO sounds (LUA script delays legato trigger 10ms, moves the starting point of the sample to a later point for the next note, while extending release time of previous note…keeps those settings until pedal is let up). Proper phrasing.
The altered HSO presents aren’t ‘great’…I just roughed in a bit for ‘proof of concept’ (no real time spent balancing and perfecting the instruments, or the score itself). If anyone wants to take a peek at these HSO preset edits…here they are (along with some sample scores that piddle with partial expression maps for them):
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1aQcyWR3rnRTfYiCUkQF0Lt-FiSbmFPwp?usp=sharing
These are just HALion/Sonic ‘presets’, some scripts, and a new Macro Editor UI in a VSTsound wrapper. Just download and ‘double click’ to install. If you want them gone later…use the Steinberg Library utility to remove them. No I never finished modeling all of those articulations listed. The marcato is atrocious (maybe I’ll get around to fixing it someday).
You do need HALion Symphonic orchestra installed, with a proper Dorico Pro or HSO key in place for it to work.
They will work in HSSE 3, Sonic 3, Sonic 7, HALion 6, HALion 7, etc. Nothing is ‘locked down’ about them so anyone with full HALion can dive in to see exactly what I’ve done to it.
Concerning dynamics control, I wonder if CC11 could be replaced by some more rarely used message, so that data written for other libraries wouldn’t interfere with NP’s handling of dynamics. Arne (@Wallander) , would this make sense?
Paolo
Certainly having some fun getting NPPE BBC SO Core working. I loaded a string section into NPPE which worked fine. Then i wanted to see how that would work mixed with Kontakt 7 end point config with a harp selected. All fine and seems to work nicely.
One thing does puzzle me - I save all in Dorico and exit to test that my playback template works OK. I have to load the NPPE string section first in NPPE then open up Dorico. So currently Dorico doesn’t remember the locations of NPPE loaded instruments?
Is this an improvement that might come with Dorico 5 perhaps?
If i am right about this at present it is a little awkward since in a larger selection one would have to preload all the NPPE instruments and therefore remember which you had selected before loading the Dorico file. Accepted you can save NPPE instrument selections as template.
Another small problem i am left with redundant Harp mixer slot in note performer which ideally i woul like to remove as kontakt is taking care of the harp. Reloading my kontakt/noteperformer template does not seem to sort this out - although one or two folk here have said that it shoul sort it
Kind of hoping someone will tell me I am wrong about the location point I made in the first para and Dorico 4 remembers the locations of everything 
Best wishes all.
Okay. I have little to add to this very helpful discussion about NP4, except to gush. This is literally a dream come true. @Wallander should immediately be eligible for sainthood.
This clip is a section from a documentary score I just started on. It’s all BBCSO Core with a few Pro instruments added. No reverb or EQ whatsoever.
Hello, this piece of music is really beautiful. Was it created using the BBC Core loaded with NPPE? Is the sound coming from a music notation software or a DAW?
Thank you, Jason. This is BBCSO Core loaded into NPPE and scored in Dorico. No DAW involved.
This is what I mean about Dream-Come-True. I am gobsmacked over this. 
Oh my goodness, why does this piece of music sound so smooth and beautiful? It’s like it was tailor-made for NPPE. However, when I play my music with NPPE, it’s not smooth at all, very different from yours. It may be related to my composition level. The music you wrote is really impressive and of high level!
I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve attached the score for you to look at.
WTBA Documentary - section 1.dorico (2.4 MB)
Thank you very much for generously sharing your composition project with us. You are truly amazing haha! My friends and I were all amazed when we listened to your work. We found that the sound produced by our software, Dorico and NPPE, was completely different from yours. It seems that NPPE is more suitable for large orchestras with complex arrangements, rather than small ensembles such as chamber music.
I’m guessing that all of us will become more expert in working with Dorico+NPPE as we go along, and get used to the nuances. This is a big deal, and there’s a lot to comprehend. Keep working at it!
That’s a bug. It’s supposed to sound something like this:
Isn’t CC110 (described in the NotePerformer Version history) exactly what you’re describing? @Arne might explain a little bit, maybe (as we’re so fortunate to have him here these times)
Thanks, lovely music and thanks very much for sharing it. Amazing quality.
Feels like we are in a new world with Doricos DAW like dimensions.
