That would be a very suboptimal experience. Many (most?) users want the ability to load a project and press Play. Many others want more sophisticated playback without setting up massive Cubase templates and fiddling with keyswitches. I find it quite disrespectful that you suggest we’re spending time on playback features merely because a ‘revenue analyst’ thought it was the most profitable.
5 Likes
A notation software that converts a score to a beautiful and realistic mockup without the hours of tweaking in a DAW (thus loosing focus on musical ideas / creativity) is a dream to me.
Thanks to playback templates, expression maps and Play tab, it seems Dorico is getting there… Adding to that the ability to add synths/VSTs and create custom techniques for them : So one could write for a mix of orchestral and electronic/sound design in Dorico, and get a good mockup from notation, which is amazing !
I’m really looking forward to seeing how this ecosystem will develop. I’ve also seen demos of Staffpad and I’m really impressed.
Really exciting times for composers…
2 Likes
I don’t think I’m the only one here who would like to work entirely in Dorico and for the most part already do. Some parts of playback such as the Expression Maps are far ahead of Cubase – at least in terms of usability. So I greatly appreciate what Paul and his colleagues have already achieved (which isn’t to say I and others don’t drop suggestions of how to develop things further from time to time).
2 Likes
I’m not suggesting anything, I’m just bewildered by Steinberg’s resource poilicy. And by all means, I’m NOT suggesting that you shouldn’t work on PLAYBACK FEATURES, I’m only saying that Steinberg already has a prime DAW which could handle VST hosting, Mixing and audio output., and that I find it puzzling that one hasn’t taken advantage of that. MIDI output, Expression maps and associated technicalites should of course come from within Dorico. With virtual midi cables, it’s a matter of record arming Cubase and hit Play in Dorico. I’m sorry, but I’m totally convinced that the world is ruled by business analysts, be it music software or apples and oranges…
I assure you that the world isn’t run by business analysts, sigh. Just people who are are passionate about what they do and occasionally totally convinced in a way which can sometimes make conversation harder.
I’m very glad that Dorico does not delegate all audio to Cubase, I would like to work completely in Dorico, and I have found a point where sending MIDI from Dorico to my DAW over a virtual MIDI cable breaks down. Granted that I have found some ways to mitigate that, but I don’t think the MIDI standard really expected us to use it to quite this extent. They probably originally thought 16 channels was a lot.
1 Like
Hey @Ulf, in case you’re still wondering (a week later) the status on this, the problem has vanished since I downloaded several updates to my Spitfire libraries. I’m considering the issue resolved.
With respect, @fratveno, I’d suggest that any kind of supposition about how and why Steinberg and Dorico do things internally, or what they should be doing instead, is fruitless, unless you’re privy to Steinberg’s management and organization.
1 Like
I 100% agree : my problem with very large templates have been completely solved using VE Pro - And bonus : your files load almost instantaneously.
Hi @MiloDC,
A little update on the “Rite” test ! Please find attached some passages. Much more work required to make it sound acceptable, but still a fun exercise !
- Introduction
- The Augurs of Spring
- The Dancing Out of the Earth
1 Like
Sweet, @Tarknin! Much of that sounds rather good, and it sounds like you’re limiting yourself completely to playback adjustments, making no changes at all to the score. (I had another go at that score recently, but gave up after encountering some bugs, like whole staves of notes that wouldn’t play and that I couldn’t click upon. Just trying to highlight them proved impossible; can notes be locked, somehow?
Curiously, when I turned on voice colors, all the notes for those staves would remain black. I threw up my hands at that point.)
Balancing the instruments is obviously a real trick, especially if you refer to certain interpretations of the music that have become more or less standardized in modern renditions. Did you find, as I’ve found, that Spitfire’s clarinets are rather loud compared to the rest of the orchestra, and that the English horn has to be cranked way up? I’d be curious to know your whole approach; are you modifying output levels in Kontakt, for example, or are you doing that in Dorico? (I do it in Kontakt, myself.)
Sounds as if those inaccessible notes were the result of condensing (you cannot select them and they remain black/dark gray when voice colors are enabled).
1 Like
Thank you @MiloDC !
I made lots of edits to the score : dynamics, and some articulations that were off (I replaced lots of longs by stacc. for better phrase shaping). I had to push a lot of instruments forward so we hear the melody they play (english horn, flutes, horns and trumpets), and reduce lot of others that would otherwise cover them (some long chords, due to Spitfire not having strings divisi as we discussed, but also some trems). At 2:21 of Augurs of Spring (rehearsal mark 29), I had trouble making trumpets (perf. legato) loud enough. Their long patches had a much better timbre and dynamic, but totally inexpressive for a melody ! So I stick with perf. legato. Generally speaking, I found performance legato patches softer than their longs counterparts.
It’s probably much better, as you did, to balance template inside Kontakt : I’ve not touched a single volume fader in Kontakt… Also, I’ve not used CC11 yet.
Much more work remain in “Augurs of Spring” from 3:00 and “Dancing Out of the Earth” because I’ve not at all edited the score yet (brass could be more piercing in the beginning of the latter).
I really understand advantage of Noteperformer, especially for large orchestral sections !
Mmm… It seems the staves you are talking about are condensed, aren’t they ?
Interesting. My approach was always to consider the actual score inviolable, and to limit myself completely to tweaking Spitfire. Based on what I heard, I thought that you were doing the same, more or less.
Interestingly, in the course of playing back the Introduction, I elected to switch out ALL of my woodwind patches in Kontakt for the “Core Techniques” sets. In addition to offering a few more techniques than the standard patches, and sounding a lot better in passages with many short notes in succession, they also offer the major advantage of being editable, since they aren’t scripted (unlike the performance patches).
Yep. Note performer is basically like the Performance Legato patches for Spitfire Strings, or the standard patches for Spitfire Solo Strings – only it covers the whole orchestra. I really wish that Spitfire had released Performance patches for their brass and (especially!) woodwind sections.
Yep, that was the problem. 
Thanks. I’m going to get back into it, see what kind of playback I can produce. Probably just for the first couple of sections of the score.
Hey @Tarknin, here’s what I’ve got after a first pass. Actually all of Part I of the ballet:
https://stash.miloonline.net/dorico/rite_of_spring_1_spitfire.mp3
Notes:
- No changes to the score itself.
- Dorico bugs prevent proper playback of a few articulations, e.g. the clarinet trill near the end of the Introduction.
- I have yet to implement the Spitfire Solo Strings library for those bars that would require it. I started doing it, but the wall of suck that immediately ensued drove me to save that whole headache for another time. (Dorico’s voice-to-channel mapping system is fairly horrid.) So, those bars won’t sound right at all. (Fortunately, there aren’t too many; the Spring Rounds section suffers the most.)
- The damned cor anglais, and especially the horns, are going to be a major challenge in several places. Spitfire’s unarticulated cor anglais and horns are just too mellow, no matter which samples or scripts you select.
When @Stephen_Taylor originally posted the score, I’d planned to set Spitfire’s sounds to it, and use the resulting VST settings and expression maps for my own music. Now, I’m not so sure; the way the score has been interpreted for the 100+ years of its existence really isn’t in line with the notation in several places, requiring either direct modifications to it to get it to sound anything like a standard rendering, or interpretive algorithms (e.g. NotePerformer) that filter everything through contemporary rules of aesthetics. I think I’m just going to stick with the set-up that I’ve labored over for my own compositions, with which I’m generally quite happy.
2 Likes
Nice, @MiloDC ! It seems the audio cuts at 13’54, so I couldn’t hear the end of Dancing Out of the Earth.
I have a few questions/remarks, if you wish to discuss :
1a/ Your brass section is really powerful (horns in F, trumpet m.101, trombones m.127/131), which I struggled a bit to achieve. Also, your piccolo (e.g. m.92) stands out while mine is a bit “hidden”. Have you raised them a lot in Kontakt ? More generally speaking, I’m curious to know the main instruments you had to balance (by a few dB or more subtle adjustements ?). Which dynamic curve power have you used ?
1b/ You probably noticed we don’t hear much trumpets melody m.194 and after. This seemed odd to me due to how powerful your brass section is everywhere else, but this is probably due to the mp dynamic. On the opposite, ostinato of horn m.182 and trombones m.190 seems too loud.
2a/ Did you have to add staccato to all famous repeated chords of The Augurs of Spring ? For me, sempre stacc. was insufficient to trigger it. (Same with mm.208 to 215: have you added staccato to Vln I ?)
2b/ Not sure why, these chords become “glitchy” from m.118 ?
3/ How have you handled strings divisi ? Since most of the time I used performance legato which doesn’t handle polyphony, I just enabled “independant playback of voices” (this created lots of incoherent VST instances I had to delete to then duplicate the proper ones). The template was already occupying 19 Gb (/24) of RAM, and the whole process was painfully slow.
Mmm odd, I haven’t encountered this bug.
I only added them for a passage in The Augurs of Spring (mm.138 to 189). The process to add an instrument to this already big score was painfully slow on my computer (perheaps I should have worked with individual flows instead of the whole score).
Did you encounter some slow down on your computer ? I’ll probably have to invest in some SSD and more RAM (even if I had a few Gbs left).
I’m not sure if this is a private post, it got sent to me automatically via email. But I just wanted to say thanks to @Tarknin for spotting those mistakes in Part One, bars 40-3, and for the oboe trill in bar 56 - for some reason I thought that was supposed to be a descending trill but I was wrong!
I fixed some mistakes in Part Two as well, and they are both updated on the Google Drive:
Part One
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UdMJn42FbGWZhFkUBaZ3oHuJw7Z-t3Fp/view?usp=sharing
Part Two
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lJgbVBcaPkgMQCnqpKOxTgCbB0zt1Iiv/view?usp=sharing
And thanks for all these fascinating sound files - it is really interesting to hear these different sample libraries in action.
I found those mistakes, @Stephen_Taylor. It looks like you got copied on my private message to @Tarknin, presumably because I mentioned you in it. (Or, perhaps your notification persisted from when my response was public.)
I know that you’ve been updating the score, but I’m still using the first version that you released. I don’t suppose you’ve document your changes anywhere? Errata would be nice to have.