I’m using the GM mapping (percussion map in settings) for input and pressing C2 + C#3 together I end up with this:
After a bit of playing around I can see that pressing C2 + anything results in those 2 bass drum notes, and playing C#3 + anything results in 2 cymbal notes.
Is there a way around this other than going back to the staff position setting? I’ve been putting drums in with gm mapping for 20+ years so trying to unlearn that might break my brain!
Might someone be able to do a quick test for this at their end to see if this is a me issue or a Dorico issue? Thanks!
This might be totally unhelpful, because I’ve never used percussion notation in any notation software. However I tried a quick test (which became more complex).
Starting with a completely new file, and adding just a drum set player and instrument, and setting its percussion map to “General Midi”, I produced this:
I’m sure that I didn’t reproduce your setup correctly, because I found the notes for the bass drum on the F above middle C on my midi keyboard, and for the cymbal on F# a diminished 12th above middle C.
Bar 1: F, F#, both notes together. Looks ok.
But this looked suspiciously like putting the notes on a treble clef staff (which looking back on your original post is exactly what you don’t want).
So, bars 2-4: I played down and up the white keys and Dorico placed a note wherever a drum set instrument exists.
Bars 5 &6: Pressing and holding the F, then going up (or maybe down?) the white keys. This looked alright at the time.
Bars 7+8: Pressing and holding the F# and then playing down the white keys. Unexpected doubled notes do appear.
Because of the rhythm mess in bars 3 & 4, I decided to delete and re-enter everything. This time the result was as expected:
So then I checked playing notes simultaneously (extra note going up or down the white keys):
Bars 10-12: F played every whole note.
Bars 13-15: F# played every whole note.
Bars 16 & 17: I tested how closely together notes have to be played to appear at the same rhythmic position. It’s fairly timing critical .
In another recent post Daniel mentioned a fixed threshold of 100 msec. I’m not sure whether that’s relevant here but I’ll check that shortly.
In conclusion, there do seem to be cases where unexpected doubled notes can be generated in drum parts, but I can’t point to any specific causes.
In case it helps, here is my test file, so that you can see the settings I was using.
Drumkit-1.dorico (463.4 KB)
As I said, I’m a total novice in the percussion area of Dorico. If you can give me the settings I’d be happy to test this in something closer to your use case.
David.
Ok. Here’s the post about inputting simultaneous notes.
It seems like the 100 msec delay applies to the case I tested.
Now I’ve found where to select the percussion map in preferences, so I think I’m using the same setup as you. The test was similar to what I described above.
As you can see, no unexpected notes:
I was wondering if your MIDI keyboard might actually be sending out those notes. Because of the way the keyboard switches are scanned, a hardware problem can produce weird effects.
As a quick, but not conclusive test, you could try setting your keyboard to output an octave lower and playing an octave higher, to see if the result changes in any way.
Hey, thanks for helping out with this.
I’ve tried changing various options on my keyboard (including your suggested one of transposing octaves) to no avail, unfortunately.
I also quickly tested an old keyboard and had the exact same problem, which leads me to think this is happening within Dorico.
Yes, something’s probably happening in Dorico, but on your setup and not on mine.
Here’s my project file using the percussion map for input:
Drumkit-2.dorico (464.4 KB)
It might be useful to know whether it displays on your system as in my screen shot.
Beyond that, probably the best thing you can do is to post your project here. That would give the experts the best chance of spotting what’s going wrong.
Ok I’ve cracked it - thanks to your demo file!
My original project was using Drum Set (Full) whereas yours is using Drum Set (Basic). The mappings for them are obviously different:
I suspect if you used the same drum kit setup you’d have the same problem. Here’s a demo file with the Full drum kit mapping, if you wanted to try it: Drumkit-2.dorico (417.1 KB)
Removing the extra Kick and Crash from the percussion kit solves the issue.
I’m tagging @dspreadbury in because I think this may be a bug…?
I’ve been looking into this tonight, and under certain circumstances I too can reproduce it. There’s quite a bit of fuzzy matching that goes on when mapping the input pitches you play on your keyboard to the instruments in the kit and consequently on which instruments the notes appear. In the case of MIDI pitch 36, for example, it’s matching both the low kick drum on note 36 and the very low kick drum on note 35, and the points-scoring algorithm used to pick the best note returns the same number of points for both of those percussion map entries, so it ends up inputting both of them. If you play only one note, then a special bit of pruning logic kicks in to remove one of the two notes, but this doesn’t kick in when you play multiple notes.
The long and the short of it is that it is indeed something Dorico is doing that should be improved, rather than anything you can influence yourself (aside from either using the basic kit or only playing one note at a time), and we’ll take care of this in due course.
Hi Daniel, thanks for looking into this in more depth.
A possible solution might be to allow an ‘override’ for which midi note connects to which drum kit instrument. Perhaps a midi learn function or similar? I can imagine this could be very useful for complex percussion scores that utilise lots of different noteheads - one would be able to make a custom midi mapping to quickly input these notes without having to use the technique modifier thing.
I agree that in ambiguous cases some kind of explicit mapping might be useful, but I think we’d like to avoid it if we can. You don’t often hear people say that the percussion mapping and input process in Dorico is among its simpler and easier-to-understand areas, so if we can avoid adding more complexity to it…
