Hi, if I combine an accent with a staccato dot my playback is changing to a keyswitch which isn’t assigned to any of the articulations.
Is there a workaround? Or is there one articulation symbol which has the staccato + accent as one symbol?
You probably need to define an appropriate accent+staccato switch in your expression map.
This is one thing that I find annoying about Playing Techniques and Expression Maps in Dorico, and believe me, I have spent many, many hours setting up PT’s and Expression Maps for all my VSL instruments - Running in VIPro, not the Synchron Player which I don’t like as much. I don’t quite understand why combinations of PT’s cannot be overridden. For example - With VSL we have several different types of staccato to choose from, so I can create custom PT’s for each staccato type and successfully apply that PT to a note with a staccato on it - hide my PT as it is not relevant to the visual score, and I can successfully get Dorico to play back any staccato articulation that I choose. The same applies to an accent or tenuto mark - I can get Dorico to trigger whatever I desire via my custom PT. Once you start combining PT’s this changes. You have to create the combined playing technique as Daniel suggests above, but then you are limited to it only triggering the sound that you have specifically assigned for say accent + staccato. My problem is that sometimes for a note with an accent and a staccato I might want to use a sfz patch…later in the same arrangement I might want to use a marcato patch instead, for the same articulation. If you don’t specifically assign a combined PT to a playback patch in the Expression Map, Dorico will trigger the default or ‘natural’ sound. I don’t quite understand why I can override single articulations with custom PT’s but not combinations.
If one could suppress the articulations that would help, but you can’t. Similarly, I have a big problem with the playback of tremolos which cannot be suppressed without also suppressing the actual note itself. I can assign my tremolo patch via a PT, but I will end up getting my tremolo patch being tremelo’d which sounds terrible, of course.
I am hopeful that some of these things will be adjusted in future versions.
As for work arounds: You can always suppress any given note, create an identical note in another voice and ‘hide’ it behind your original note using the voice column function and hide stem function etc…then apply your custom PT to the note in your second voice. This can be a bit fiddly. The other option that I use is to ‘create a staff below’ which is a brilliant function. You can suppress the notes on your main staff and trigger your preferred articulations from the identical notes on your new staff below - then ‘remove staff below’ and it will play back as desired, even though you can’t see it.
In a similar vein, it would be nice to be able to apply more than one PT to a single grid position.
You can at least add multiple playing techniques at the same rhythmic position, so it should be possible to define the kinds of combinations you find necessary to produce the particular results you want.