Playback - wrong techniques

Dorico
21

I took a look at your score excerpt and the techniques are playing back as entered here on my system.

I see a few things that might help get a smoother translation at this tempo.

  1. In the play tab, choose Playback Options.

  2. Make the default note duration times a little larger if you want smoother near-legato transitions.

I noticed that you seemed to possibly have difficulty hearing the bass pizz part, as you had the volume jacked up to the maximum on that track in the posted score excerpt. Those pizz notes are there, and technically they are in relatively good balance with the rest of the string section.

Perhaps your speakers just don’t translate very well in the lower frequencies, thus making the basses difficult to hear?

If this is the case, it’s OK to boost the weaker frequencies a bit using the EQ in Dorico during your composing stages (or for any renderings intended to play back on YOUR system); however, if you intend to share audio renderings with others you might want to invest in nice monitors or a good ‘clean’ set of headphones with a full/dry/flat frequency response (20hz - 20,000Khz minimum for headphones, while for monitors, go as low and high as you can reasonably afford…you’re not likely to get down in the 20hz range without spending big bucks on those of course [subs and such]…).

As you can see above, I’ve created a pretty big boost in the frequency range between 100 and 300hz (will probably need to narrow the curve a bit when arco stuff comes in, but I don’t have that in your excerpt, so it’s a starting point). I also took a moment to pan the instruments out more in the stereo field so there is more definition/clarity in the overall sound of each instrument section.

So why make adjustments to the EQ instead of just pulling the Basses volume to the max? Well, in theory, this should help prevent some major ‘balance’ issues on your small speakers when you go back to ‘arco’ for your basses, and perhaps sustain notes in the more upper registers of the instrument.

Here’s a great EQ reference chart to keep bookmarked!

Also, there are indeed some cases where you want much louder pizzicato than you’re getting here. This one is marked piano though, so it’s proper that Dorico is going to play it softly. You could always change this to mp, mf, etc…(Keep a different copy of the score for playback purposes, from what you’d use for ‘printing’ purposes).

As for that lame/dry harp sound, he just needs a little stage ambience before hitting your well chosen ‘scoring stage’ master reverb that you loaded in the Aux Send (Reverb Slider). We could do more to make it more realistic from inside Halion itself, but just as a quick example; on Dorico’s Mixer, we could fatten up the sound a bit with a tone-booster plugin, add a touch of mid-high frequency reverb. All with the insert slots in Dorico’s Mixer.

Finally, depending on your speakers, sometimes some maximization or compression can help you bring out the quiet stuff on smaller speakers. Be aware this will ‘remove’ the natural dynamics inherent in symphonic music, so you probably will NOT want these plugins active when rendering mix downs to ‘share’, but when you’re working and mixing in composer mode, there is nothing wrong with overdoing things so that it’s audible and clear on YOUR speakers. So many of today’s little computer speakers are simply meant to be ‘small, inexpensive, and energy efficient’ that they just can’t translate the full dynamic range of symphonic music unless you compress the mess out of it.

The topic of compression and expansion is beyond the scope of my present time allotment to go into with any depth here, but I can suggest that it won’t hurt to load up a Maximizer in the Main insert slot and experiment with it a bit. While using this improperly can wreck a mix intended to be exported and ‘shared’ out in the wild, it’s not going to hurt a thing if all you’re doing is trying to get mixes to translate on whatever speakers/ear buds you happen to have plugged into your system during a work session.

Here’s an example of what compression can do. I’ve crunched this rendering a quite a bit dynamically with tiny laptop speakers in mind.

Excerpt of Folk Song Suite.mp3

Here is a copy of the score with the tweaks used in the above rendering applied.

Excerpt of Folk Song Suite.zip (1.32 MB)

  1. Applied a tone booster and a touch of reverb to Harp.
  2. Applied compression, and some EQ to boost lower frequencies of the Contras.
  3. On the Master: Some presence EQ, a stereo widener, a Maximzer, and 16bit dithering since it was going to MP3.
22

That’s a voluminous and extraordinarily helpful answer. I’m boomarking the whole thing for future reference. I can’t thank you enough.

Apologies for the excessive boosting of the bass part in the file I sent – I foolishly thought that that would make it easier and quicker for anyone to hear just what I was referring to (since, as you say, it is marked p under the orchestra). I don’t normally keep it like that, and will follow your advice about how to temporarily boost a part in future.

The returned project file had no sounds loaded when I downloaded it, so I had to re-load them as before, and may have thereby destroyed any point you were making. Double basses are virtually inaudible, but I’ll blame that on my puny MacBook speakers. My sincere thanks for all the trouble you took dealing with my ignorance.

23

Sorry the instruments did not load. It may be because I’ve got some beta Version Sonic SE stuff stuff installed here.

Did the plugins I added in the Dorico Mixer insert slots load with the project?

24

I’m not sure. Where would I find them, and what would they look like? Right now, looking at the Mixer insert panel, I see only the usual default dashes.