Hello!
Some percussion instruments in my project are - for some reason - playing back as woodwind instruments. I use Noteperformer, and on previous projects it hasn’t been an issue, but my sizzle cymbal and brake drum playback sounds like a flute. I don’t really know where to start with this - any help would be appreciated. Thank you!
Did you upgrade to Dorico 6.1? If so, there are some issues with percussion maps. But I cannot confirm whether Noteperformer is affected.
Robby
I have not updated yet, no. This project is similar to another where I used these instruments and they were fine in the other, just not in this project. I started a new file from scratch and didn’t touch any playback features.
Have you tried reapplying the Noteperformer Playback Template?
Robby
I believe so, but in case I didn’t do it properly, would you give me a quick tutorial?
Reapplying the Playback template doesn’t fix this for me. (But for reference: Play menu / Playback Template / Apply and Close will reapply it)
Here’s what has: try “change instrument” (right-most button in the bottom left corner of the “edit percussion kit” window under the Setup tab). Maybe change it to something else random, and then back to the desired sound? This has happened to me several times with the kick drum in a drumkit and Note Performer playback, and trying that finally fixed it in one file that I hadn’t been able to get working correctly.
Tried the first, no change. The second option did change the sound, but only from a flute sound to now a bongo/conga sound for both instruments. I really don’t understand what is going wrong! I also am unsure how to assign a particular sound to an instrument (if that’s even possible.
I don’t think that NP has those sounds. I think a conga is used when the sound/instrument isn’t found.
Jesper
Yeah I’ve experienced this too. The sizzle cymbal behaviour in NP is quite annoying since bongos/congas don’t sound anything like a sizzle cymbal. I wish it would fail over to a suspended cymbal which is at least in the ballpark.
Is there a way to change these sounds manually in Dorico?
I remember what I did to work around it is I made a suspended cymbal and changed the staff labels to the correct ones for sizzle cymbal. There might be a better way, though.
NP will accept MIDI bank/program change events. It can even be done from a fresh manually started NP instance. I.E. Start a fresh instance of NP, connect a stave to it. Send any random PC event to wake it up, then use the internal NP menus to choose the proper instrument from there.
Drum kits can be a bit different as a bank change might also be required to get the kits you need showing in the NP instrument chooser.
So….
If you have a MIDI controller that can send that stuff, you can first select a stave and do so. If you don’t have a controller that can send bank/program changes, pop open the expression map editor, make a temporary base switch, enter the bank and program changes there, and tap the “Audition” button to send it instantly. From there you can either delete or disable the switch (Or just click cancel when done).
Here I just added a ‘Zing’ base switch in the expression map for an existing NP stave.
Note that the bank change events should be sent first:
CC 0 is the MSB for a bank change and should be sent first,
CC32 is the LSB and gets sent next.
Finally, send the program change.
I’ll keep it around just long enough to tap that ‘Audition” button and get it sent. Then I’ll click ‘cancel’ to close the expression map, and ‘discard changes’ so anything I did here isn’t actually saved in the expression map.
The trick is to know what the bank and program changes are. It’s not hard to find it all. Not sure about Mac, but for windows it’s all in an XML file in:
”ProgramData/Steinberg/Dorico 5/PluginPresetLibraries/NotePerformer/presets.xml” (For some reason this stuff isn’t duplicated in the Dorico 6 folder, but it’s still applied. I guess Dorico 6 falls back if it’s own ProgramData directory is empty?)
To save folks the trouble of hunting it down, here’s a copy of the xml file where one can find the proper bank and program numbers.
presets.xml (30.7 KB)
It might also come in handy to know that custom NP instances can be saved as VST3presets if you ever want to make and call up dedicated instances that are already set up and ready to go.
