It just occurred to me, looking at Play/Playback Options: since VSL instruments pretty much universally have marcato patches, am I getting a double marcato effect for my money? i.e., is both Dorico and VSL adding dynamic to the note?
If you don’t want Dorico to increase the dynamic for marcato notes, this is easy to change either globally in Playback Options or on a per-expression map basis in Play > Expression Maps.
Thanks Daniel. Can you explain what the numbers refer to? Or maybe it isn’t the numbers per se – I have some fps in a generally p passage, and they seem to be playing back disproportionately loudly. Is the f part of the fp being interpreted as forte-then-piano rather than a-bit-more-than-an-accent (by set percentage)? Does that make sense?
The numbers refer to the number of dynamic levels. The step from f to ff is 1.0. I can’t remember exactly, but I think the fp does increase the dynamic level by 1 relative to the current level (because if the prevailing dynamic is already ‘f’ then you would expect to hear it increase to the next level). If you switch to Play Mode and show the dynamic lane then it will give a clearer indication of what is happening (and you can override the effect there too).
VSL is not adding a dynamic to the score literally as marcato is a specific way of playing. Dorico will always default to the library patch when available in the Expression Map but will indeed boost the dynamic with the playback options default 0.80 – just under a dynamic marking as Paul says. In contrast, I tend not to assign an accent to a separate patch in VSL but simply allow Dorico to boost the dynamic for me.