I have just upgraded to Dorico 5 - btw, if you haven’t, do. About 5 minutes of playing with it and I have already justified the upgrade cost.
My question is about all of the HaLion Sonic etc. content. I mostly use NotePerformer - I value “spending zero time to have it sound really good” over “spending 4 days making it sound perfect” - just my personal preference.
But, NotePerformer does have its limitations. My question is, if I download HALion Sonic 7, should I download SE3 Content, Symphonic Orchestra or both? What is the difference?
Olympus Choir Micro seems pretty self-explanatory, as does Groove Agent, which looks like it is going to save me a lot of time fannying about with invisible drum-pattern staves etc.
Final question - will the playback sound stage stuff work with Note Performer? It seems to me as if NotePerformer basically attempts to fool Dorico into thinking it’s only one instrument and get you to do all the mixing etc. in it’s own pop-up window.
using sound stage with NotePerformer has already been discussed and the consensus seems to be that it’s not a good idea as NP already has soundstaging built in. However, I do swap out the default Reverence reverb for something from Altiverb which does work well. Of course to get the most out of NP, you should invest in one of the playback engines.
I’ll let others comment on Halion – I never use it.
Noteperformer does its own reverb and stereo mixing, so you don’t need to use Dorico’s Stage and Space Templates on top.
I’d recommend installing all of the Dorico sounds – simply because there is a much larger range than with NP, so you’ve got something to fall back on. They don’t take up much space, in the grand scheme of things.
I’d answer it differently, since you’re already a NP fan but feel it has limitations, why not just upgrade to NP4 if you haven’t and get BBCSO? That will kick any of the built-ins to the curb.
Otherwise echoing benwiggy I’d recommend just installing everything, and you’ll pretty much always have a sound somewhere when you need it
In my view the BBC Core is the best value engine to be used with NotePerfomer at the moment. Much more musically involving than the VSL Prime if full orchestra is your thing. There’s absolutely no comparison in quality with the native NP or Halion.
Spitfire sales are pretty frequent, Like many, I got BBC Core for around €$250. You used to even get a 50 discount if you’d already got Discovery which was free anyway.