Hi. I’m a new user to Dorico (from Finale). I’m stymied by playback. I just want instruments to sound vaguely like what they are–like a violin that sustains rather than decays. But the paradigms seem very complex, especially when it seems like this should be the default behavior. I haven’t found basic support on this. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks!
Correct playback is Dorico’s default behaviour. You must be doing something unusual. Can you upload a misbehaving project?
The default Playback Template is quite thorough.
Go to Play > Playback Templates > select the long one starting with Iconica (can’t remember the full title!) > Apply.
Does that improve things at all?
That helped a lot! Violin is now bowed, and guitar is now plucked. I’m not sure why it wasn’t like that to begin with (Janus is right, I must have been doing something unusual), but I’m happy.
One follow-up: The third instrument is an instrument I created by copying the Accordion instrument. The only change I made was to have it use just a treble clef. That’s playing back as a piano (i.e. decaying). The original accordion does not decay, just the copy. So I guess I have to assign a different sound to this new instrument. I’ve been unable to find a place to do that. Can you point?
Thanks!
I’m not sure about the Accordion/Piano thing, sorry. I would have expected that it would be the same if you’ve just duplicated the instrument…
Check your Preferences>Play>Default Playback Template settings
If you create a player in Setup and choose an instrument for them (eg. Accordion), Dorico will use this template to set up the sounds for that instrument for you.
Yeah, I think the challenge is that I created a custom instrument (initially copied from an existing instrument), so maybe the template doesn’t know what sound to assign to that new instrument. Though, as Daniel says, I’d expect it to use the same sound as the one it was copied from–though since my copying was before I reset the template maybe something got lost.
If anyone knows where Steinberg explains how to assign a sound to a custom instrument, they can point me. It’s possible that this is an “endpoint” thing, but all discussions of endpoints instantly turn into five-dimensional chess. Thanks!
Possibly. But why did you feel the need to create a custom instrument?
(I think creating instrument variants, rather than new instruments, is more reliable)
Ah! I now see that there are two options for creating a new instrument: “New INSTRUMENT from selection” and “New VARIANT from selection”. I just now created a variant, and it is now using a reasonable sound for playback. Yay!
(The Dorico Help instructions here* seem to combine the two concepts, as does the interface itself since it calls a copy name a “variant” name, unless I’m misunderstanding. FYI, I created the copy/variant only in order to display just a treble clef, no bass clef. Maybe there’s an easier way to do that.)
Thanks for the generous help, all! I’m fully functional now.