With the advent of D3 I am now fully in the ‘switch from Sibelius’ mode and am loving it. I have just discovered something that I am a little quizzical about. I use VSL percussion instruments and as such, a single patch can have different sound variations on different notes…I’m not interested in using a percussion map because you are somewhat limited when using these kind of patches, so I treat percussion instruments like normal pitched instruments. Anyways, I created a bass drum staff in Dorico (one line) and assigned my bass drum patch and also assigned a custom made expression map to it. If I use step time input, it doesn’t matter what note I hit, when I play the bass drum part back it always triggers the sample on B4…That’s fine, and somewhat expected. If however I go into record mode and live record some hits using different notes, Dorico plays back the different pitched notes and consequently the different bass drum samples, even though the staff displays only the single pitch on the single line that is the bass drum staff. This is actually wonderful once you have quantized the recording etc…but you cannot now edit the pitch information. My question is this: Is this what it is supposed to do and will this behavior remain or will it be considered a bug and changed at a later time. Hopefully it will stay, but will we be be able to edit the pitch information after the fact at some point? This behavior is really, really useful when you have patches with variations of timbre etc on different notes for the same sound. It is in fact brilliant, but the lack of pitch editing has me wondering whether this is meant to be like this…Or maybe we will be able to step time input notes using different pitches, but still display the single pitch on the single percussion staff line.
It’s not intentional that the notes play back at different pitches when there is no percussion map, but I can see how it can be useful. There currently isn’t any UI to change the pitch, but maybe you can just start note input and re-pitch with a different note from the MIDI keyboard.
Okay…That’s what I was wondering. I hope it stays, although some sort of UI would be incredibly useful. I’ve tried changing the pitch of notes by moving them up and down…this does not change the triggered pitch. Neither does invoking note input…if you play a new note in, it defaults to triggering B4. The only time you can play back different triggered pitches is if you record them first. I know you said that this is not intentional, but I think this is something that could be very useful as you pointed out…Sample libraries often have many variations of the same ‘hit’, particularly with drums and percussion patches, and the ability to vary the timbre but still display one note on a single line staff is totally awesome in my book. Food for thought among the many items on your list. Thank you!
The other advantage of this method is that if you are using a patch with multiple hits that you wish to trigger…Instead of setting up complicated expression maps to define different types of hit, you simply record the hits in you desire and then label the notes with regular text. One problem I have encountered is that you cannot have more than one voice on a single line percussion staff. How do you achieve an upbeat grace note roll on such a staff?
In other words, how do you create upbeat grace note rolls that are not considered part of the rhythmic grid. In the attached pic, I achieved this result in the timpani part by putting the grace notes into a different voice and beginning and ending this voice with the grace notes…Is that the right way?
You can flip the stems of the grace notes, just like the stem of any other note: select the note and hit F.
I would think that using the “Input Percussion By MIDI Number” would be a great help entering different types of hits on a single line.
I am not yet a Dorico Percussion guru, but I think you are working against, rather than with, the system. I would add the grace notes before the Timp hit as grace notes in the same voice. If that sounds wildly off, then I would try to adjust the playback in Play.