I’m getting some strange sound artifacts when changing VST instruments. I can’t really explain this and I’m a total amateur when it comes to all the playback and MIDI technicalities. I’ve attached a sample; perhaps anyone can analyze that and knows where this is coming from?
I’m using Dorico 2.2.20.1286 and VST Audio Engine 2.1.20.518 in OSX 10.11.6, by the way.
sound_artifacts.dorico.zip (623 KB)
Those will undoubtedly be keyswitch notes intended for the automatically-chosen HSO sounds, which just produce low, audible notes in the other sounds you’ve chosen. Go to the Endpoint Setup dialog and choose more appropriate expression maps for each patch you’ve manually chosen.
Thanks Daniel, it seems to do the trick. But I must admit that this whole concept of expression maps is very confusing to me. I’ve even watched the tutorial video but it feels like this is more complicated than it needs to be and/or it could be explained in more detail.
If I add a new player with a saxophone, apparently it gets assigned CC11 (dynamic) as expression map. Why is that? And why are expression maps not reassigned automatically if I change an instrument?
When you manually change sounds in HALion Sonic SE, Dorico doesn’t know that you have done so, so it’s impossible for it to choose another expression map automatically. It’s up to you to change the expression map if you change the sound.
It’s worth noting that this doesn’t happen if you run in the fully automatic mode where you allow Dorico to load the sounds for you (by selecting a playback template in the Play menu, or leaving it at the default). It only happens if you change the sounds to one that requires a different expression map. If you’re not sure what you’re doing, Play > Playback Templates will always get you back to a known good state.
Right, that’s what I’m doing, because when I’m writing for a Jazz band I’m not particularly content with the orchestra sounds of the brass instruments and then the “Noisy Sax” sounds with all the reverb that don’t match the brass at all.
If you have a particular ensemble size that you write for commonly then it could be worth looking into the new v3 Custom Playback Template feature so that you can just configure your preferred samples once and then easily re-use that in your other projects: Custom Playback Templates | New Features in Dorico 3 - YouTube