I’m writing because I’m experiencing two issues. While playing with the Cinematic Studio Orchestra sounds, the transition between legato and short notes produces audio glitches: the legato notes are much quieter than the short notes. Additionally, the legato produces half-tone portamentos that are quite unpleasant.
Furthermore, when testing the engine I’m considering purchasing for BBCSO Pro, I noticed that short notes played as semiquavers are not consistent at all.
Have I missed a setting in Dorico or in the NPPE engine?
I can’t say exactly without seeing your score or hearing the result but on the surface this sounds about right. The NPPEs are definitely not perfect, and can quite frequently struggle when switching between legato and short notes, especially in a faster or agile passage with lots of that going on very quickly. It can be a bit of a battle.
A few things you can try include placing staccato dots over the short notes, even if you might consider them unnecessary in the score (as in obvious to a real player), they can force the NPPE to render a tighter and more consistent sounding short note, especially when played back to back with legatos.
Also in the NPPE tab have a look at the bottom of each instrument for the bit which says “Using Marcato Overlays” – experiment with and without.
If you want to extract a short and challenging melody or passage to hear what it might sound like through BBCSO Pro, I’d be happy to test that for you so you can hear the results rendered, before making an expensive decision (FYI Spitfire products are non-refundable/non-resellable).
Lastly regarding the portamento issue, it should be disabled by default, so that is odd. However to be entirely sure, go into your key editor and load the lane CC111. Create an automation point and set it to 0. According to NP:
Thank you very much for your message. I will look into these possibilities for Dorico’s native portamento. I tried it, and the result was almost comical, with notes ending up a quarter-tone off! That said, the legato feature isn’t bad, and I think I might use phrasing slurs that will be hidden in the conductor’s score or disable legato playback in certain passages.
My main issue concerns staccato notes with a dot, which are absolutely inconsistent in the software. When listening, the basic sounds work fine with short notes, but as soon as I use the engine, it becomes irregular—except with Cinematic Studio Strings, where it works, but not with BBC sounds. There must be some explanation to allow for consistent sixteenth-note staccatos.
Yes, different libraries have their quirks which result in different renderings of the same techniques and articulations among them. Depending on what you’re writing it can definitely be frustrating, disheartening even, when switching from the precision of the Native NP sounds (as synthetic and not-so-pretty as they might be), to the NPPE’s which do sound really nice but can drive you crazy trying to understand why a certain legato phrase or short notes are struggling so much.
I find there can even be an apparent inconsistency which is made most obvious by doubling: where the same exact part, doubled on one instrument to the next, for example might render as expected on a flute, but be rather wonky on an oboe. I’ve even witnessed such inconsistencies on the same instrument in another part of its range, at times which is expected based on how the instruments ranges can handle parts, but a lot of time it doesn’t make sense why one part rendered well suddenly falls apart when dropping it up or down an octave on the same staff!
Sorry that I don’t have much to offer in the way of help here, other than to confirm that your experience is not necessarily abnormal here. It’s worth noting that it is less a fault of NP and NPPEs, and more a fault of the different sample libraries being used for each and their own quirks internally (how they have been scripted, volume and latency differences etc). If you try the BBC (and I assume CSS) directly within dorico without the NPPE liason, you’ll probably be thanking NPPE for what it’s actually able to do considering how wonky the direct rendering can be.
I don’t own CSS but I own BBC, SSO, and Synchron. Out of all these Synchron has proven to be the most consistent and dependable across the board (though it still has flaws). But BBC and SSO, both sample libraries developed by the same company (Spitfire), can render the same part radically different, so I often end up A/B’ing both to see which interprets the music best. Having used both of those a lot in the past year, I have started to develop an understanding of the types of phrases which work and don’t work best for each one, but even then it can still be somewhat of a crapshoot.
My impression about the NPPEs is that they generally sound more beautiful and realistic, but cannot always handle the most complex or agile passages, and of particular note they often falter with extensive legato or frequent back-and-forth legato. For this reason I sometimes end up mixing and matching NPPEs with the native NP sounds. One area of strength for native NP I find are brass, especially any fast and agile trumpet lines. I still haven’t found a library using NPPE that can handle what I envision there, so unless I’m doing whole note brass pads I usually don’t even bother with them for that context.
I’m not sure if you have seen this thread - long but informative. I picked a post mid-way in that seemed on point, but it’s a pretty good read IMO regardless of the route you choose:
