Tempo below 80 bpm! > Dorico changes automatically playing techniques

Hi,
I have a question about tempo changes in relation to play techniques in the new Dorico 3.5 When I change the tempo below 80 bpm (and also Below 40 bpm) the program’s interpretation is shifting from very short notes to short notes. (or even medium) Therefor loading different samples out of my VSL sound library. Is there a way to overcome this. I would like to put tempo’s in the composition but Dorico should not change the sounds. Very short should just stay very short independently from the tempo I put.

I think the automatic interpretation of short and long notes is a great improvement and actually so simple. Too much control from Dorico is however in this case not really necessary. Or at least let us control that ourselves.

Another tip for improvement especially for the guitarists;
Fingering in chord diagrams would be highly appreciated. Changing the number head in TAB notation into cross head to indicate a slab. I think right now TAB numbers can not change into anything else.

Thanks,
Vincent VanEker :guitar:

The note length conditions are based on the played length of the note in seconds rather than the notated musical duration, since the short articulations in sample libraries have a fixed duration in seconds. If you reduce the tempo then the played notes have a longer duration. If Dorico continued to play the very short notes then they would sound as staccato.

Hi Paul,
Thank you very much for your quick reply. I understand what you are saying and it’s totally logical. Still I would like Dorico not to mess around with my library of selected sounds in my expression maps. So my question stays the same or more a request…give us… the users the posibility to control that ourselves. Too much control of Dorico is frustrating the flexibility and creativity of the users.

Friendly greetings,
VV

Dorico isn’t messing around with anything here - it’s just that the ‘short’, ‘very short’, etc are defined in terms of absolute time in seconds because that’s how they are implemented in sample libraries. We hope to make it easier to override the articulation used over selected notes in the future, but this is how it works for now. All of the requests we’ve had up to now have been that the conditions should respond to the played length of the note - this is the first request that we should ignore it.

Thanks again Paul for your quick reply,
Again your explanation is very logical and thank you again for that. But I’m sorry to hear that you are ignoring this so quickly.
I don’t see that Dorico has been programmed in the other direction. So why not changing to very very very short notes if you go above 140 bpm.
The difference between a 80 bpm speed and a 79 bpm speed is just 1. But has great effect on the loaded sounds. So all I’m saying is; just put a button so we can say yes or no to this automated technique. VV

The transition regions are currently hardcoded; perhaps we’ll have a way of setting custom thresholds in the future. If you don’t want it to change the sound then you can remove or disable the ‘very short’ articulation in the expression map.

From my point of view, this is working the way I’d expect and the way that seems most logical. The hard-coded thresholds do tend to make shorter patches chosen than ideal quite frequently and at the moment, it’s often best for that reason to allow full notated length patches to kick in a bit earlier than you might expect though obviously exactly how it will work depends on the VST used. Naturally when this is user configurable, any such restrictions are likely to disappear.

Still, using this while actually composing for the first time as opposed to merely testing with existing work, it has already saved a surprising amount of time.