I’ll start by stating that I currently use Dorico Pro 6 with Noteperformer 5. Like many users I was somewhat disappointed when Wallander recently discontinued their Noteperformer Playback engines but I completely understand the reasoning.
I also own BBCSO Core and have managed to get this working using the Dorico supplied playback templates with a few tweaks of my own.
In a recent fit of Black Friday induced madness I somewhat reluctantly purchased a full version of Spitfire Symphony Orchestra 2024 with the reasoning that “How hard could it be to get this working in Dorico” As it came with Kontakt 8 Player I saw no need to purchase a full version of Kontakt.
Well, after hours of playing around and venturing down numerous rabbit holes I am no closer to getting it working effectively (By that I mean sounding close to what native Noteperformer can do).
My questions to the forum are as follows:
Has anyone managed to effectively use SSO with Dorico and have it sounding good?
Are there any playback templates in existence that will work with SSO, Kontakt 8 player and Dorico 6 without wholesale revision on my part?
Am I better of downgrading Noteperformer to version 4.5 and making use of the NPPE on offer (note that I have tried this initially and ended up with massive ram usage and heavily distorted sounds so am open to suggestions on this)
Or is it that everyone who wishes to use these products accepts that there is a massive investment in time to achieve a workable outcome?
Personally I would rather spend the time composing music but, having invested in the sample libraries, I would really like to get some value for money from them.
Sorry if this sounds like a rant but it is very hard to find answers to the numerous questions that I encounter as I try and solve this problem.
Happy to listen to any opinions
side note : I have looked at the excellent work done by @MarcLarcher on percussion maps but have struggled to make his templates work .
Yes. And the problem is that notation is inherently imprecise. Every player knows that a staccato at one point in a score will have a different nuance from the same mark at a different place.
Furthermore, Sound Library producers are really not interested in notation, so their products do not follow notational conventions. (My pet hate is their use of the term ‘spiccato’ or the nonsense term ‘brushed spiccato’)
You can get any library to work reasonably with Dorico, but you will likely be dissatisfied with some aspect.
Thanks for the response. I’m starting to realise this, however at the moment I’m struggling to achieve even this. It may be that I have to ‘chip away’ at this over a few months to get a template that I can live with
What percussion library have you been using ? I might be able to help you to make those percussion maps work…
By the way I do have SSO, but wo far I’ve only really used it with NP4.5 and the NPPE (and it was quite good actually). The main problem with those librairies is that they’ve been built with the DAW workflow in mind, not notation program. Then some articulations are oddly balanced (which is easily manageable with a template that has different tracks per articulation, not with Dorico… nor Cubase used with expression maps)
I’m using the Spitfire Symphony Orchestra 2024 library. I can decipher your percussion maps (mostly) but come unstuck when I have to re-map the standard key switches in Kontakt 8 Player. It seems that the instrument it loads uses key-mapping to assign certain ranges of the keyboard to each instrument. Unfortunately this doesn’t correspond to your percussion map. When I try to remap it seems to default back to the standard mapping.
Doh!!!……. Maybe that’s my problem. I assumed that SSO was using it. Your percussion map and kit setup in Dorico are really good (especially the level of detail in the playing techniques) and parts of your dorico project playback, I just assumed that I could tweak the percussion map and line up the SSO instrument with your percussion map.
I examined your picture and it looks like a whole rehaul of Joby Burgess library. Well, my work had two distinct (but very important sides): on the library side, I did give some presets, where I set each key switch (according to what is useful with Dorico), and on the Dorico side, the percussion maps that work with those presets. Clearly, if you cannot load my Metal percussion, or High percussion ot Toy, etc. the maps are close to useless.
I did alert the folks at Steinberg when they created a now defunct forum that they should care about notation and give maps along with their products (as VSL does). It had no impact
Try to load the presets into Kontakt. If they work, you can use the maps. If they don’t load, you’ll need to create yourself ypur own presets that match the percussion maps, which is not real fun
The frustrating thing is that with the SSO2024 Drums - high preset loaded in Kontakt. It does not map all the allowable articulations by default and gives you a defined range for each of the instruments. So I could probably re-do the percussion map to match this but then I lose some of the articulations. It also means that the endpoint in Dorico only has 1 entry as there is only 1 instrument on 1 midi channel ? I was following the line that for each unique instrument I would load an instance of “drums - high” into the player and then assign a unique midi channel to correspond to the instrument in Dorico, that way I could save an endpoint and replicate it in a playback template.
I’m pretty sure the Joby Burgess Percussion is included in SSO now because Spitfire has discontinued it as a separate product. You can’t buy it anymore. They wouldn’t have done that if its content wasn’t in SSO.
Why are the presets so important though? Weren’t you just using the default mappings and key switches for the library? I expect those would be unchanged - I normally use UACC or UACC KS to guarantee this. Or does UACC or UACC KS not apply to percussion?
EDIT: I guess UACC and UACC KS do not apply to percussion, however, it does look to me like all of the individual instruments have default keyswitches populated for everything.
I can actually find resources for a technique called brushed spiccato, so I don’t think it is completely nonsense.
My pet peeve isn’t that term, but instead the made up term “spiccatissimo”, that Spitfire has incorporated into several libraries. I know that someone is going to put that on a score or part one of these days and look foolish.
Unfortunately they are not all mapped. If you look at my graphic up top you can see what I mean. The “Green” region is allocated to the Conga 1, however Flam, Roll and a number of articulations are not actually mapped. I’ve sort of managed to grind through it since communicating with @MarcLarcher and finally figuring a few things out with Kontakt 8 Player. I’ll keep at it and see how I go.
You loaded up the ensemble patch though that contains several instruments (probably a reduced set of articulations for each). If you load up the individual instruments instead, they all have default keyswitches mapped for everything including the rolls and flams.
Here is the Conga 1 loaded by itself, you can see they all have mappings out-of-the-box:
I would suggest building for those and not the drums-high and drums-low. They’re likely to keep those keyswitches for the individual drums consistent into the future.
I actually got SSO recently too and so I could actually use these myself. I hadn’t necessarily planned on using any of the percussion but I might.
Please consider mapping these to the individual drums instead so that these can be useful for more people other than just you. I can’t overemphasize how much better that would be.
BTW in addition to the listed techniques, it looks to me like there are right handed hits on the next note above. The conga 1 for instance has a bass on C2 but also on D2, probably the one on C2 is a left hit and the one on D2 is a right hit. I’m not sure how the template by @MarcLarcher handles that but I usually program the “R” playing technique to trigger the right handed ones, but I would hide them as I would never tell a percussionist what hand to play a certain note with.
As it came with Kontakt 8 Player I saw no need to purchase a full version of Kontakt.
