Some instruments not loading sound

Hi all,

I’m just learning Dorico with Elements 3 on Windows 10. I had trouble getting sound working at all, but thanks to help from folks on here that’s working now. But I now have another sound-related problem.

Most instruments that I’ve experimented with work fine, at least in that i get an appropriate sound automatically loaded with the instrument. However, when I started messing around with unpitched percussion, I found that some instruments don’t load a sound.

My simple example is as follows: In a new project, I added two players and gave one a side drum and the other a bass drum. Everything is good in setup mode, I see two percussion clefs as I expect. In write mode, the side drum is fine, and when I enter notes I get sound. The bass drum, however gives no sound. Likewise on playback the side drum sounds and the bass drum does not.

In play mode, rather predictably, I saw that the bass drum had not been assigned a sound, but the side drum had. See attached screen shot.

I tried manually adding the sound by imitating the settings for the side drum. This gave me a sound, but the wrong sound (a click). I can see the percussion map that’s being used, and I can see there are a couple of bass drum sounds in there, but I don’t know how to tell the program to use those sounds. I’ve read up on percussion maps but somehow I’m missing that link.

So I guess I have two questions:

  1. Does anyone know why the bass drum doesn’t get a sound in the first place? I’ve tried this multiple times from a clean project, and it consistently happens. Also, as another data point, this happens with some other unpitched percussion instruments (e.g. tam-tam). I haven’t seen it with any pitched instrument yet (I’ve tried probably a dozen of those).

  2. Given that it doesn’t automatically assign a sound, how can I fix it manually so I assign an appropriate sound?

Thanks for listening!
Elenmirie

Does Elements have the ability for you to change the Playback Template in Play mode, apply it, and then return the original Playback Template and apply that? Sometimes that clears up sounds that have been assigned after the fact and do not play at first.

Thanks Derrek, I tried switching Playback Template to Silence and then back to the Elements mode, and it did not fix the problem. Thanks for trying though! I wonder if I have a wonky installation…

I think I figured this out - my working theory is that there are some instruments that show in the pick list but don’t have sound mappings in Elements. Bass Drum is one of them. I can choose Kick Drum (Low) and get sounds loaded automatically.

You’re quite right – I will come back to this thread when I get a moment longer to think about it, but the problem is that there’s no orchestral bass drum sound in the HALion Sonic SE factory set, and Dorico doesn’t have a good alternative, so it doesn’t load anything. I need to think about whether there’s something better it can do that would be better than nothing.

Hey there,

Is there a way to understand how to properly use the Halion Sounds? I’m working with a large ensemble and it looks like I can upload 16 channels; Some instruments do sound correct even without that patch inserted (i.e. flute), and some (cimbasso, flugelhorn, for instance), sounds like a piano.

Is there a quick way to solve this issue?

If you want to use Dorico’s built-in factory-supplied sounds, you can simply go to Play > Playback Template, select HSSE+HSO (Pro) (assuming you’re using Dorico Pro) and click Apply and Close. This will cause Dorico to reload all the sounds required to play back your score.

Dorico itself allows you to create more than 600 different kinds of instruments, not all of which have sounds in the factory-supplied content, so in some cases you may find that the sound Dorico loads isn’t exactly what you would hear in a real ensemble.