Greetings,
Long-time Sibelius and Cubase user, thinking about switching to Dorico. Need to figure a few things out in Dorico, first, starting with Drums. Would appreciate any help.
Goal: Get various Snare articulations to play back on my VSTi (BFD 3). Snare itself plays, but I want to try a Rimshot.
I’m including a few screenshots of my Percussion Map and Playing Technique settings, as well as my tiny example project. Not sure what I’m missing.
I did see one Forum post about something very similar that mentioned you had to Shift+Alt to select the articulations, rather than just changing the note heads. I’ve tried this with no success.
Drum Test 2.dorico (403.1 KB)
I think the problem, Scott, is that you’ve defined Rim in the Percussion Instrument Playing Techniques dialog, but Rim shot in the percussion map. Use the same playback technique in both places, and you should be all set.
1 Like
Confirmed! Thanks, Daniel. 
Daniel -
In Sibelius, I created a custom percussion stave for Hi-Hats. Basically, the lines correspond to the relative state of the hat’s “openness”, if you get my meaning: the bottom line is closed, the second is 1/4 open, the third is 1/2 open, etc… Then I can use either standard or “x” note heads to indicate whether the stick “tip” or “shank” should be used.
This general approach has worked perfectly for me and enables use of the full hi-hat articulations in BFD3.
Before I go further in Dorico, can you let me know if the same thing will be possible? If so, do I need to use the Percussion Kit approach or is there a better/simpler way? I’m a tad stuck figuring this one out.
Yes, you should be able to achieve something similar in Dorico, but it’ll be a little bit indirect. You would need to edit the hi-hat instrument such that it has mappings for your tip and shank playback techniques. Then you can create a percussion kit and add as many different hi-hat instruments as you have degrees of openness provided by your playback device.
I don’t know how BFD handles this, whether you have separate patches for each degree of openness running on separate channels, or an entirely separate instance of BFD for each degree of openness, or whether you can access all of the different sounds using MIDI controller values or different pitches within a single percussion map. That will influence how you actually persuade Dorico to play the sounds.
Assuming it uses a different pitch for each sound, so e.g. closed tip and half-closed tip are different notes within the same patch, then in fact what you’ll need to do is create individual playback techniques for each combination, e.g. “closed tip”, “closed shank”, “3/4 closed tip”, “3/4 closed shank”, “1/2 closed tip”, “1/2 closed shank” etc., and assign all of those to the hi-hat instrument.
Then in your percussion map you need to assign “closed tip” to (say) note 36, “closed shank” to note 37, “3/4 closed tip” to note 38, etc., as specified by the BFD documentation.
But perhaps BFD works a completely different way to this. How do you select between the different degrees of openness in BFD?
Daniel - please forgive my delayed response.
Yes - in BFD it’s pretty simple: there are separate MIDI notes for each. The hi-hat has a bunch of them assigned for the openness attribute (closed, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, open) and whether the tip or shank is used. It’s a unique MIDI note for each openness/stick-point-of-attack pair, if that makes sense? Here’s a screenshot, but there are so many MIDI notes they don’t fit in the little window (one must scroll):
I was partially on track figuring it out, but got a little stuck so thought I’d check on feasibility before I went deeper. Per your feedback, I shall press on!
BTW: Good to hear from you again. I remember getting to chat with you a bit back on the Sibelius forums.
Great, so it should be possible to define new playing techniques for each of those MIDI notes, and define them all in your hi-hat instrument using the appropriate noteheads, and get things working relatively easily. Let me know if you run into any problems.
