I wanted to do some Rossini, and this was the opportunity of testing an hybrid method with Dorico and NotePerformer. I didn’t just enter the notes, but adjusted their position and duration while listening to how NotePerformer was reacting.
It was a live collaboration, as during a first rehearsal. This resulted in a mockup that wouldn’t make sense without NotePerformer, but goes further to the usual ‘passive’ mode of using NotePerformer.
With the many performance controls I needed, I’ve felt the strong desire to hide hairpins and tempo variations several times. Oh, how I hope they will come!
Inasmuch as this is a comparison between a plain NP playback and VSL Synchron, here are my thoughts. They both sound pretty good of course. (Except in both, the dynamics are too extreme, those ffs made me jump each time!)
I’m not sure which I prefer. The VSL sounds are better, but they come together less well, and in some bits the strings sound quite metalic and phoney.
With the pure NP version, everything blends better and is more expressive I find. It’s more low-fi, so it sounds to me a little like listening to a clean gramophone version from the 50s, but precisely because of that I feel one forgives the lower quality of the sound, because the blend is better.
So I guess for me the NP version wins.
But as for all the tweaking you’ve done behind the scenes, I can’t comment on that. Sounds pretty good to me!