Hello,
I would like to ask that how to get Olympus Choir Micro to work with Dorico? I have installed Olympus Choir Micro and it shows in Kontakt Player 6 but doesn’t show in HaLion SE. Could you tell me some help?
Yes, if you’ve got Dorico Elements 3 or Dorico Pro 3 installed, and you installed all the sounds that came along with it, then you already have the appropriate Olympus Choir Micro sounds installed, and Dorico will use them automatically when you add an appropriate singer instrument to the project.
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I’ve got Olympus Choir Micro to work (to my surprise, given that I’ve never used DAWs or similar programs before). However, I can’t get the Gregorian ‘instrument’ to respond to the expression markings I’m experimenting with (currently marks like fff, ppp and hairpins). I’m learning about Expression Maps from Steinberg videos, so I tried to find the relevant data by going to Play>Expression Maps in the current score. However, the only instruments showing there are some - but by no means all - HSO orchestral instruments, two HSSE guitar sounds, plus NotePerformer and a couple of controller ones such as ‘Velocity + ModWheel Dynamic’. No choral sounds at all. I’m evidently on the wrong page in more than one sense - where should I be looking, and what will I need to do to get the HSSE voices to respond to dynamics, in the way the NotePerformer instrument in the same score - put there as part of my attempts at experimentation - does?
There’s not a separate Expression Map for every instrument. For instance, some instruments respond to dynamic control on the Modulation Wheel (and no other CCs), so they all use the Mod Wheel Ex Map.
There is no ‘Choir’ Ex Map as standard: Dorico will assign the Olympus voices one of the existing maps. You can see which one has been assigned in the Cog wheel dialog. I suspect it’s Mod Wheel, but I could be wrong (I don’t use the Olympus sounds much.)
However, according to the Olympus Micro manual, it uses CC72 and CC73 for ‘swell control’: one for each layer of the sample (e.g. Women’s voices and Men’s Voices’.
So you may be best served by creating your own Expression Map, and setting CC72 to the Dynamic control, and CC73 to the Secondary dynamic control.
Thanks for your guidance, benwiggy. This is new territory for me, so I’ve got a lot to learn.
Hi Daniel,
I’m using the Olympus Choir Micro in Dorico Pro 3.5. I’ve found that the instrument has different vowel sounds (Ahh, Ohh, etc.) I don’t find a way to assign changes from one to the other in a voice: e.g.: say Soprano starts with Ahh and then it changes to Ohh, etc.
Are any of the techniques assigned to trigger such changes? So far in the manual I’m not finding any explanation to help me understand what to do to achieve what I want.
Makes sense?
Any guidance is greatly appreciated.
Thank you
Olympus Micro has “Sustain Ah”, and “Sustain Oh”. The same for Staccato.
These are separate sample instruments. You could load them into different MIDI channel slots :
You’d then have to create an expression map that responded to playback techniques by switching the channel. And then create Playing Techniques in your score that marked where you want the changes.
(Note that Playing and Playback techniques are different things: Playing Ts are score elements, Playback Ts are styles that affect the sound.)
So, you’d create a Playing Technique for use in your score to change to Oh, which triggers a Playback technique, that the Expression Map assigns a MIDI channel change to. And the same again for Ah.
It might be easier to assign the two sounds (MIDI slots) to two different voices of the same “instrument.” One can then switch voices when switching the lyric to effect the sound change.
One might have to fiddle a bit with stem directions if the voice change occurs mid-measure, but that is probably not a big deal, all things considered.
Another option is to use key switches. These are easily overlooked: You will need to shift the keyboard in Halion to see them. To do so click several times on the little arrows to the left and right of the keyboard (see the red circles in the screen shot).
You can use the key switches in an expression map to trigger the various sustain and staccato Ahh and Ohh articulations.
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Hi,
I decided to get the Olympus Choir Elements, which has an expression map that would allow me to use all it’s sounds by combining the use of duration, force & stress articulations with the play techniques in common and choral category.
I tried it but even though I installed this VST as indicated, it doesn’t seem to work.
In Play mode, going to the instrument and selecting it, I see the new Olympus but after selecting it, I get the Micro edit screen.
Any idea?