Hi,
I had a small piece of music on Maestro using ‘Slow Strings’.
I re-input it to Dorico and it sounds good except that the attack on the strings would be better if it were smoother.
Is there some way to achieve this, adding Legato didn’t seem to help much.
Can an envelope be applied to selected notes?
Regards, Rob.
The sounds on iPad are fairly basic, compared to those on the desktop versions – where of course you can use any of the countless instrument libraries that work through VST plug-ins.
I have Dorico 5 Pro and the BBC SO Pro. I also have difficulty with “attack” in the strings. I have tried extending the note length; I have used legato and long; i have used slurs; i have inserted legato in the dynamics etc. Despite all of this the Nimrod variation sounds jerky. Am missing something?
Regards
Steven
Out of the box Dorico seems to set most things at full scale with a somewhat linear kind of dynamics curve! It can be quite brash/loud, and in your face (particularly with HSO). Scale that mess down a good 30% at least! Get some breathing room for the mix.
HSO’s default settings with Dorico ‘out of the box’ is SO LOUD that it gives a terrible impression of the library’s potential (it also has twisted and just ‘wrong’ idea of how to use the ‘slow legato’ keyswitch, so I just delete the legato entry in the expression map right away, and let Dorico auto overlap). Tone it down a LOT dynamically (I start at around 50%), and it’s a lovely little library.
I don’t know that specific library, but some use a combination of velocity and some CC event to get different types of attack.
The first place to check is in the instrument plugin itself. If it has options to adjust the ‘velocity or dynamics’ curve…experiment with that first.
I.E. In HSO, there’s a dynamic curve to play with…and it can drastically impact the overall style and quality of the mix.
Within Dorico…
You might try scaling the velocity down a bit. Several ways to do it.
One way is to adjust the overall dynamic curve of the entire score in Dorico’s playback options.
Check the expression maps for the given articulation that has ‘too strong’ of an attack. If velocity is involved in dynamic controls, set the ‘max’ velocity to something lower and see if that helps. Even if your library isn’t using velocity at all to influence the attack (only CC controls), you still might try setting a lower ‘max:’ for “Volume dynamic:” in the expression map.
Finally, can use the note editor to manually pull velocity and or dynamic CCs up/down for selected notes.
Note, if you scale an instrument back in terms of how ‘hard/aggressive’ it plays, you might also need to bump up the master volume levels a little in the main mixer to get things back in balance with the rest of your mix (or bring everything else down).
Other things that can help…
You get a nice assortment of high end effect plugins with Dorico. It has an AMAZING dynamics EQ, and a nice supply compressors. Experiment with these, as you’d be surprised at how well they can isolate annoying harmonics (micro adjust very specific attack characteristics in given frequency ranges) for a given instrument and put them in a mix in a way that soothes the ears instead of having a ‘nails on a chalk board’ effect.
This EQ Mixer insert is amazing!
And the multi-band compressor is pretty nice too!
If Brian’s suggestions don’t give you what you are looking for, you could give Noteperformer and the BBCSO pro Noteperformer Playback Engine (NPPE) a trial.
Noteperformer sits between Dorico and the sample library.
I use this set up with BBCSO core and I think the string sounds are great (with one reservation - this solution plays unslurred notes much more detached than it should).
Thanks Richard and Brian, i’ll give the suggestions a try. I really appreciate your time on this. Can you use Noteperformer and Dorico at the same time though? I have Noteperfromer working with Sibelius at the moment.
Sure, support for NP is built into Dorico.
Out of the box, if you select the NP playback template, it will use the built in Noteperformer sounds.
If you run NPPE (a standalone app) and load some sounds into it from, say, BBCSO, it will use those sounds.
I think you will need to install the NP for Dorico version.
Yes, but if one only has NP installed for Sibelius or Finale, one has to re-install it to specify Dorico access is available.
Thanks again for your efforts! I am nuts about the BBC SO Pro sound library, so i will try anything to make it work well with Dorico. I moved precisely from Sibelius, because of the pretty average sound qualities of Sib and NP.
I agree. NPPE has become an indispensable part of my work routine but the imbalance in dynamic, and timbre in brass instruments, when staccato is used renders it of much less value at times. It would be wonderful if Arne could address this issue but I guess it’s more complicated than it might seem to the end user.
