Please help me clear up these points

I just purchased Dorico and I have some questions. I would appreciate if you could confirm, deny, correct the following points.

  • I’m trying to have Dorico play drums from a third party VST. I understand that I need to have playing techniques assigned in the percussion map that are referenced in the instrument’s setup playing techniques. I fumbled for some hours but couldn’t suceed, but I guess this is because of stray “natural” techniques that take over when they shouldn’t. Moreover, starting a new project I noticed that all work was gone, so all percussion mapping and playing techniques must be project based.
  1. Is it the best course of action to do all successful mapping and setup of 3rd party VSTis in one project that will be saved as a template, and then always start from there when I want to use them?
  2. When I have finally set this up correctly, I assume that using Alt+Up/Down when writing will go through all available techniques for each kit piece, automatically swapping out noteheads that have been assigned to a particular technique for example?
  • Unrelated: At some point I called the jump bar, but then I couldn’t get rid of it off screen. I can’t remember what exactly I was doing at that time because I’m fooling around exploring the program, but are there any known limitations when it comes to 2 screens? Anything to look out for?

Thank you in advance for your aid.

Anything you create via the dialogs in the Library menu is scoped to the current project, unless you explicitly take action to do otherwise. The intention behind things like percussion maps and expression maps is that you build them, then save them as part of a playback template that you can then apply to new projects. Playback templates will bring any required percussion and expression maps, instrument definitions, playing techniques and playback techniques etc. along with them when they are applied to a new project.

It is certainly helpful to have a kind of scratch project in which you can develop your playback template, but it’s not necessary to do so: you can do this wherever it makes the most sense to you. I suspect most users work on these aspects on an as-needed basis as they are working on a project. You can update a playback template at any point by re-saving it via the Playback Templates dialog.

Regarding the jump bar, if you find it appears but you can’t get rid of it, which is not something that commonly happens, you should certainly find that if you save, close and reopen your project, it will go away when the project window closes.

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Ah, that didn’t cross my mind.

Thank you very much Daniel!