Simple guide for making a drumkits work in Dorico ?

Dorico
61

Just use midi note numbers, not note names.

On the topic of mapping, I’ve learned that:

  1. playing techniques are assigned to voices. So if all instruments in a kit are in the same voice, it would be applied to all instruments in the same voice
    That can be avoided by breaking down the kit to voices.

  2. custom playing techniques are defined on a project level
    That’s good and bad. The good is that a project can be shared and people will see the same playing techiques/
    The bad is:

  • you lose playing techniques in other projects / starting from scratch
  • playing techniques alone can’t be exported (or I don’t know how)
  • they seem to be encoded in binary files, not xml (or I haven’t found them in the project yet)
  • it’s not possible to combine multiple different templates using different playing techniques

Now this last one is bothering me. If project A has Modern Drummer custom techniques and Project B has some other instrument customisation, how to combine both project templates into one?

62

This is actually a great idea. I am not sure why this has not been done before? I wonder if there is a deep rooted reason why this cannot be achieved?

Robby

63

Magicaldog can you try this project and see if it works for you? You need to use default Modern Drummer mappings, not general midi

64

It seems to work !

But I like to have the standard 5 line staff

65

You can!

In the setup, click on setup->Layout options , go to players → percussion and select “5 line staff” next to Komplete Abbey Road Modern Drummer.

Now, the kit includes many instruments, too many for 5 lines. In the player, go right click on the kit → edit percussion kit. There you can edit how and which instruments show in the staff. You can remove everything from claves down to tambourine (click on “remove instrument from kit”) icon. Do the same for all you want to remove and reorder to your liking the ones you want to keep.

Sounds complicated, but it really isn’t, just try it.

66

Here is a video:

Layout Option Dialog Box: Cmnd+ Shift + L on a Mac

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XeEFuHzyRipW2TzWNRcCi3W9g5EVSKRC/view?usp=sharing

Robby

67

I did that with your project but then I only saw one instrument !

68

Hmm… you did something wrong. Note that the first few flows are only playing one instrument each, so of course you would only see one instrument!

69

Do you see any note numbers on KONTAKT in the attached image ?

I don’t

Dorico-Octav-offset.jpg
Dorico-Octav-offset.jpg1926×910 489 KB

70

Look at the first column, labeled “MIDI Note.”

71

Use the documentation…

72

I also have problems with the 5 line staff:

  1. Notes are not input on the highlighted instrument.
    E.g., I’m on the line “tom 1”, the name is even highlighted in orange, but the note is assigned to snare drum

  2. “Rest at start and end of voices in 5 line staff” - Do not pad voices with rests is ignored
    Rests for all instruments are visible, which makes 5 line staff impossible to use for a drumset. Worse, even “starts voice” is ignored and the rest before the starting note remains visible

  3. If a single voice is used, then kick stem alone can’t be turned down - all stems at the same position are also turned down

Not sure if I’m doing something very wrong, but 1) and 2) seem like bugs to me.

It would be reeeaaalllyy cool if Dorico could work the other way around - instead of mapping from the midi to instrument and technique, it should detect all instrument/playing techniques used in the score and let them map to midi note. Would be orders of magnitude faster!

On the topic of Modern Drummer, i’ve added support for White kit as well and made some other minor changes (e.g. splash plays edge sound by default). I have enough mapping for some time :slight_smile:

Here is a song demo: Gofile - Free file sharing and storage platform (just noticed sound is lost after about a minute :frowning: )

73

Yes that’s Dorico but in Kontakt there is no note numbers shown !

74

Most Dorico user probably don’t use drums or percussion cause no one knows how it works including the developers :slight_smile:

75

What are you using to input the notes? Letter keys on your computer keyboard? Keys on a MIDI keyboard? Dorico will respect the chosen instrument if you use the letter Y - anything else basically depends on what you’ve mapped.

  1. “Rest at start and end of voices in 5 line staff” - Do not pad voices with rests is ignored
    Rests for all instruments are visible, which makes 5 line staff impossible to use for a drumset. Worse, even “starts voice” is ignored and the rest before the starting note remains visible

This is documented here.

You might not like it, but it’s working as designed. I’ve explained at least a few times how it’s possible to work around it, by using Extra Voices, minimising the number of voices in use across the kit, etc., and I’m not the only one.
Go search :wink:

76

You asked a question about “the attached image”.

If you wanted to ask a question about something different, don’t expect us to be mind readers.

(And snide comments like “Most Dorico user probably don’t use drums or percussion cause no one knows how it works including the developers” probably won’t improve your chances of getting answers, either).

77

Doh, of course. I was pressing C.

I still don’t get this.

First of all, after skimming through documentation and creating a drum kit, I learned this:

  • I can assign each instrument in a kit to a different voice
  • in the notation options I can choose “do not pad voices with rests”, and the image is showing percussion line with no rests

I believe it is a logical and reasonable expectation of a user “since I’ve assigned instruments to voices and selected no rest padding, I will get a neat restless percussion staff”. Is there a fault in my reasoning that I fail to see?

Now, when I try that, I see implicit rests, despite turning on rest padding. Why? And how is that aligned with notation options?

Further, the documentation you linked to says “Explicit rests cannot be suppressed when using the Starts voice and Ends voice properties to hide rests before the first note in voices and after the last note in voices.” It says nothing about implicit rests. So there is an assumption that implicit rests can be hidden. True, not documented directly, but kinda implied.

So, let’s try.

Nope, doesn’t work. Why has my reasoning failed?

Interestingly, if I add another instrument (so, another voice), that voice does not get a rest. Why? In the below case, why does HH have a rest but tom doesn’t? Now if you say tom is using HH’s rest, then why are not both recognising the first quarter note which is already there??

Edit: oh, it gets even more interesting. Look at the bar below. Can you tell me what happens if I add a a tom on beat 3 (without trying in Dorico!)? I

Ao after adding a tom on beat 3, now we get an extra rest for the splash (red voice). Oh, but the one for snare is gone…

78

Your reasoning has failed because you haven’t accepted that you can’t remove rests (or starts/ends voice) on unpitched percussion instruments - despite the fact that the manual tells you this.

Assign your percussion instruments to one voice if you only want one set of rests.

If you need stems up/stems down, and you don’t want extra rests, put either the downstem notes or the upstem notes into an Extra voice.

79

D’oh. Wrong link. This is the documentation that rests can’t be deleted from unpitched percussion instruments: https://steinberg.help/dorico/v3/en/dorico/topics/notation_reference/notation_reference_rests_deleting_t.html

80

Despite your original link was wrong, and the updated one tells this, your answer is not good. Please take a pause, approach what I’ve written with beginner’s mind, try to forget what you know, and read again.

The limitation of not being able to hide rests for unhitched percussion is a severe one. I would at least expect a warning in the notation options / rest padding, that id does not in fact do what logic would dictate it should do.

On top of that, if I use voices in a normal staff, I can hide rests. There is no good reason for a user to expect assigning percussion kit instruments to voices would expect differently. As I user, I don’t care about the internals. Even as a developer myself, I’m slightly amused by that inconsistency, as it seems really weird and unneeded. Must be something really wild going on underneath.

No, that breaks stems

Back to square one. Dorico is showing me they are already different voices. No matter how you try to spin it, this is just weird and a terrible workflow. I bet it will be changed in the future. Perhaps not in the near future, but I’m sure this will get polished…