I’m been spending a lot of time with my evaluation license of Dorico 6. The proofreading tool is very helpful, in general. But I’ve noticed that it gives me incorrect warnings about my mutes for brass–at least when they’re not the built-in Halion variety. I’m using the SWAM brass (from Audio Modeling) and they’re really excellent. I’ve built expression maps, which account for mutes and a number of other techniques. The path from notation on the page to the instruments (living over in VEPro-8) works quite well. I have straight, harmon, cup and hand mutes and they all sound as they should.
But proofreading claims that none of these techniques work. For example, I see the following text regarding my trumpets:
Straight mute technique intended to be used on trumpets and trombones.
It’s just a nag that I can ignore, but I’d rather not get the nag at all. I can’t seem to find any sort of attribute in the instrument descriptions to let the proofreader know that some things are OK. For example, it doesn’t know that my trumpet is a trumpet. And the warning is wrong in a more general sense, because you can–and I have–used a straight mute on a horn and tuba.
So my question is whether this warning is built into the code of Dorico, or is there something I can do in my instrument description to make it stop? Thanks.
The warning also appears for non-trumpet/trombone instruments with the Auto playback template.. it is a silly one indeed. You get the same warning with the cup mute playing technique for some instruments. Straight and cup mutes exist for tenor horns/baritones/euphoniums/tubas and e.g. in modern brass band writing are not at all exotic. I’ve even heard of a cup mute for French horn (though admittedly haven’t seen that in the wild, but if it exists then Dorico should not deny that). Interestingly you don’t get this warning when writing these PT for flugelhorn and cornet. Which is of course correct but also implies that Dorico believes those are trumpets?
Usually I’m the first to say “just ignore the warning” but this one really shouldn’t exist.
I’ve been learning what many users have probably discovered long ago: if instruments aren’t named exactly as the default instruments are named, then you get these meaningless warnings. I’ve learned the “Solo Violin 1” isn’t a violin at all: it can’t play arco, or pizz, or harmonics. A “Firecracker Snare” isn’t a snare drum, so it can’t play with snares on or off. And the player can’t do stick clicks.
I don’t want to turn warnings off–there’s too much potential value there. But I’m getting buried under these meaningless misinterpretations of instrument names. There should be a way of telling Dorico that a “Solo Viola 2” is actually a viola or a “Field Drum” is a snare. I hope someone can tell me that I’ve missed something obvious.
Changing the instrument name shouldn’t by itself change the (internal) type of the instrument, and it is this internal type that Dorico uses in order to work out its proofreading warnings. Unless this is perhaps a MusicXML import? In that case it might be the case that the MusicXML doesn’t provide enough information for Dorico to know what the instrument really is.
If you can post a short example project I can take a look.
I feel like there’s two things going on at once for @MichaelCarnes but the warnings about straight or cup mutes being exclusively for trumpets and trombones appear with unmodified instruments. Dorico’s default brass band template is a good one for that.
I take your point, but at this stage I’m particularly interested in @MichaelCarnes’s problems with instruments that don’t have the default names. If these instruments have had their names changed within Dorico itself then that shouldn’t happen, and I just want to make sure that there isn’t some sort of bug here.
I think there’s a little bit of both situations here. I am working with something that originally came in through MusicXML, but the instrument assignments weren’t correct once they got into Dorico. The names I had in the original Sibelius score had names that were descriptive of the source libraries for example: Trumpet 2 (SWAM), Tamtam 85 cm(Berlin) and so on. These wouldn’t have been correctly assigned to baseline instruments in any DAW, so they generally ended up with a piano sound or best guess. So I brought in Dorico instruments, copied the music into them and then renamed them in a way similar to I had them in Sibelius. FWIW, the actual instantiation of the instruments is over in VEPro.
This is a simplified description of what I’ve been doing to built up a large template. I will readily confess to naïveté in the Dorico way of doing things, but I’ve been pretty careful. In creating my instruments I’ve made sure to assign them to the correct instrumental groups. I’ve not seen anything in the instrument creation dialog that describes an instrument in greater depth than that. I may twiddle the range a little, but only because I know professional players can exceed the range. But my old eyes can’t see anything that says a trumpet is a trumpet other than the name itself. There’s no checkbox that says mutes are enabled for example. And there’s no place in building a snare drum instrument that says the player can do stick clicks and so on.
If there is something hidden in an instrument description that allows some techniques through the proofing filter, then it shouldn’t be hidden. I think most serious composers know what an instrument can do, so we should have a way to silence those nags in a more specific way.
@Richard_Lanyon responded with a question about a simple project that causes these warnings. I’m happy to do it, but it will take me some time to knock down the template I’m in the middle of just now. But if there are hidden things inside an instrument description that have some bearing on this, then they should be accessible. Thanks very much for your responses.
Aha, right, if these are MusicXML imports then that might explain some of what you’re seeing. Depending on the exact format of the MusicXML, Dorico may not be able to guess the real type of the instrument correctly during the import. One way to see the internal type is to open the Library > Instruments dialog, then click on the little funnel icon in the top left of the dialog (which filters the instruments that are actually in the project), then mouse-hover over them:
If you want to fix up any instruments that are wrong, you can go into Setup, click on the “…” menu for the instrument and choose “Change Instrument” from the menu there.
Very useful information, perhaps pointing to an internal inconsistency. I’ve used the “Change Instrument” in setup for nearly everything so far, so I don’t think I’ve created a problem there. Your little tip on the hover gave me an idea. Perhaps 3 screenshots will illustrate what I’m seeing. In the first, I’m showing the internal name of the built-in piccolo trumpet in Bb. As you can see, it’s named instrument.brass.trumpet.piccolo.bflat.
Now let’s take a look at one of “my” trumpets. I created it by simply duplicating the built-in piccolo trumpet and giving it a new name for the picker.
You’ll notice that it’s called instrument.user.piccolo_trumpet You’ll observe the word brass has disappeared and has been replaced by user. But you’ll also see that trumpet.piccolo.bflat has been replaced by piccolo_trumpet. This might be significant, since I’d assume the substring brass.trumpet serves as a locater for various things inside Dorico. the terminating substring piccolo.bflat would take you right to whatever is used by the proofer (and perhaps other things). But the copied version replaces all this with user.piccolo_trumpet, which wouldn’t take you to the same place inside Dorico. It doesn’t tell you that it’s a brass instrument in the trumpet family (by the way, my copy IS assigned to the brass family
In reviewing this another time, I wondered if I should have made a variant instead of a copy. So I did just that. For this last screen capture I made a variant, but did not edit it any any way. Here it is:
You can see that the variant is named internally by the same method as the copy, so I’d wager it upsets the proofer in the same way.
So if this internal naming is the reason the proofer gives alerts (and it might not, as the shot from @Zalde shows), then we do have what appears to be a logic fault in Dorico. It makes perfect sense to have the user substring in there. But perhaps the following part of the name should follow the same rule as the internal instruments. Better yet would be to have a place where the user could provide a list of allowable techniques that could extend or override what the base instruments do back at the factory.
It’s possible that I might simply edit the built-in instrument definitions without making copies, but I really would prefer to keep them unmodified. There will be times I need to revert to them and it’s best that the built-in instruments and their expression maps remain “factory fresh”.
This in itself is not necessarily a problem. Although the ID for the user-created instrument won’t be something that Dorico’s proofreader recognises on its own, there is extra information about the instrument’s “parentage” that is also available to Dorico (though it’s not visible to the user). However, if you do have a project where the proofreading warnings are different for an instrument (say, piccolo trumpet) and for a user-defined instrument that is created from it, then please let me know.
OK. Here’s some interesting evidence. I have the same passage in 3 trumpets. I’m pretty sure that I created Trumpet 1 as a duplicate of the built-in Trumpet in C. But just to be doubly sure, I just now created Trumpet 3 as a duplicate of the built-in. My Trumpet 2IS the built-in trumpet. In all three, I adjusted the top note up to D, which any self-respecting trumpet player can hit with relative ease. The endpoints for all three are instantiations of the SWAM trumpets.
Over on the proofreading panel, you’ll see that Trumpets 1 & 3 (the copies) get warnings about the mutes. Trumpet 2 (the built-in trumpet with range-tweak and banishment of the key signature) does not show the warnings. I think this is all pretty solid evidence that the copies don’t really get everything they need to satisfy the proofer.
BTW, don’t pay any attention to the “music”. It’s just a bunch of notes I threw down for purposes of testing. The notes aren’t interesting and no player on earth could change mutes this fast. Thanks again.
Done. And thanks for your attention. There’s some residual stuff over in Play (this example was cut out from a much larger template project), but I don’t think it will get in your way.
Aha! Yes, OK, I can see what’s going on here. I’ll discuss this with the team. I believe this won’t happen if you do “New Variant from Selection” instead of “New Instrument from Selection” in the Edit Instruments dialog.
I’ll give the variant a try in just a little bit. I did notice that the variant ID string looked the same as the copy. I’d be perfectly happy if the variant method works, but I’d then question the necessity of having that and a copy.
Yeah, the variant’s ID won’t be any different but the “parentage” is stored explicitly. (I think I may actually have been wrong in about how that works for entirely new instruments - I think what I said before will after all only apply to variants.)
I can verify that the variant form works for trumpet. I’ll go ahead and make modifications in my template and let you know if something else pops up there. It would be nice to see a little additional text in the popover help on the Instrument page. Something to indicate that the Duplicate is “lossy” in some way.
Thanks much for taking time on a Sunday. Now I’ve got to step out and enjoy a little winter sun up here in the PNW.
