Whether one distinguishes them with terminology or not, a variety of sounds is needed.
The 80" instrument is impressive, but I can’t see it being useful in an orchestral context.
I think Toru Takemitsu would have loved it!
2 Likes
Kind of. My understanding is that a gong has a dome where it is struck and is typically pitched.
Tam-rams are typically larger, flat and considered unpitched.
How can I do such a custom mapping for my use case i.e. to force the Dorico instrument “Tam-tam” to trigger the NPPE Synchron Prime Tam-tam (without changing the Dorico instrument to “Large Gong”)? Consulting the User Guide I could not find s.th.
For example, you can create your own percussion map from our’s.
-
Go to “Library > Percussion Maps > NP Orchestral Percussion” and duplicate our map.
-
In your new map, you delete the “48 C3 Tam-tam (medium, 18 inch)” entry. Dorico will then resolve to our large gong sound for any tam-tam sound.
-
With your tam-tam staff selected, click the “gear wheel” icon, as shown in this screenshot next to the highlighted “e”:
- That opens a menu where you can pick your choice of percussion map for the staff. Choose your newly created custom map which doesn’t have the medium tam-tam sound.
6 Likes
Thanks very much!
PS I’m very fond of the NPPE.
1 Like
One can also just rename the instrument in Setup to say whatever one wants in the score.
This isn’t really necessary, is it? Since every project carries a local copy of the map…
I think the ordinary local version updates itself automatically as we add new Expression Map versions. I recommend creating a copy.
1 Like
Yes, but editing a map in any one project has no bearing on what is on the disc…it just affects the current project. If one would like to save the edited map for future or global use, then a copy is of course recommended!
That’s true, but the project may no longer play back correctly if you update NotePerformer and it reverts to the default map.
1 Like
This thread seems to address my current topic of concern … how to improve and expand the percussion instruments available to use with NotePerformer in Dorico. I am relatively satisfied with the other instrument families, but it seems percussion is severely limited in terms of quality and completeness. As one example, I can only find two"wood block" sounds to represent 5 temple blocks and 3 wood blocks in NP without NPPE. Temple Block sounds can be selected in Dorico setup but are mapped to a default drum sound. So I am looking at CinePerc as a library to buy for the wide range of percussion I want to use. But if those sounds aren’t available for selection and mapping in Dorico Setup then how can they be used? Can NP map custom instruments created in Dorico that are then selected for a player or percussion map? Are all the samples in CinePerc usable by NP or only the ones that might correspond to instrument names in Dorico or NP? Not sure whether the real limitation is in the instruments that are selectable in Dorico and then mapped to the VST library through NP or in the instruments that NP recognizes and can deal with in the external library. As an example, how would I get a sample for an unusual instrument, say “Asian Wooden Chimes” in CinePerc, to play in Dorico through NP?
The limitation can also be at the end of NotePerformer. The sounds we support are listed on each engine’s page. Here’s the percussion for Musio Cine (the Kontakt engine may have minor differences).
NotePerformer has five differently pitched Woodblocks. They’re listed in our percussion map in Dorico. How those are mapped to the staff is managed by Dorico or the user.
For now, temple blocks in NPPE are routed through “Woodblocks” in NotePerformer. So, you can only use either woodblocks or temple blocks at a time with NPPE. The plan is to add our own temple blocks sounds to baseline NotePerformer.
It’s common for sample library to have only three woodblock sounds. NPPE will distribute those over our five woodblocks so that some trigger the same sound in the library.
Percussion sounds don’t benefit as much by NPPE as a trumpet or clarinet, we adapt a dynamic range automatically and take care of timing differences. We try to support anything that’s practical to support in NPPE, but if there are percussion sounds or techniques you want beyond those, they must be hosted outside of our software, running the VST3 directly in the notation program.
Thanks for clarifying the situation for me. I really appreciate Wallender’s responsiveness in this and other forums.
So you can only access sounds through NPPE that NotePerformer already has sounds for. You can replace only those existing sounds by mapping them to a sample library via NPPE. It seems then that all my unpitched percussion staffs will need to be direct to Kontakt without NP involved.
So if I want five different suspended cymbal sounds that exist in CinePerc, including sizzle cymbal, that would be impossible via NPPE since NP doesn’t have that many cymbal sounds. And it would be impossible to get any sizzle cymbal sound into NPPE since it maps it to some default sound, indicating that NP can’t handle any sizzle cymbal sound from NPPE.
Where can I find a list of the genuine instruments that NP can actually work with, as opposed to faking it as with the temple blocks? I don’t recall seeing anything like that in the manual.
Even if we support multiple cymbals, you can only use one cymbal slot at a time with NPPE. Being limited to just one snare, one triangle, etc., is an unrecoverable limitation of NPPE. If you need advanced percussion layouts with multiple sounds, they must be hosted outside our software. We also have a support article about it.
The sounds included in NotePerformer are listed on our front page
The mapped sounds for the engine are found on the engine page
NPPE has limited space for instrument names and doesn’t always include the full name as listed in the library. E.g., triangles may be designated “Triangle 1” and “Triangle 2” in NPPE.
Still, if you want to see precisely the sound used, you can open the VST3 interface from the Advanced menu in NPPE and see what’s playing as you enter notes into the notation program.
Very few instruments are mapped to a different fallback sound. From the top of my head, I can only think of temple blocks and some anvil-style sounds which I don’t recall the library for. The temple-blocks situation will change when we update NP to include temple block sounds. Meanwhile, you can see on the NPPE slot if it’s mapped to a different NotePerformer sound. Please see my screenshot below, where it says “Woodblocks” on the left-hand side of the slot.
1 Like
I may need, sometimes, drums with different beaters. The solution I’m thinking to is to assign to the instrument’s stave the most commonly used beater, and then use an additional hidden stave for which I choose the other beater.
So, with Synchron’s NPPE I might choose the soft beater version of the bass drum for the regular staff, and then add a second (hidden) bass drum, replicating the main part, driving the medium beater version of the bass drum.
This is a workaround I consider, because leaving percussions to NP makes them be mixed as the other instruments. The other solution – moving them out of NP – is more powerful and flexible, but requires a different mixing strategy.
Paolo
Is this a situation where Independent Playback might help with?
This worked great for me. However, is there any way to load this duplicated/modified map by default for all future projects so I don’t have to do this every time? When I think tam-tam I definitely do not think of the medium 18-inch sound produced by the stock map, which to me sounds more like a smaller tuned gong (in which case if I wanted that, I would add a small or medium gong). When I seek to add a tam-tam to my score invariably I am referring to a larger instrument of indefinite pitch, much like how this video explains. I am aware this is one of those linguistic semantic hair-splits that no one seems to fully agree on, so for my case I would like to simply load a map by default with NP playback templates where tam-tam always reverts to large gong. Thank you!