Hello everyone. I’m coming back to Dorico after some time and I’m working on a big band arrangement and have come across a weird playback issue. Some notes that are tied are not playing the full length of the swing feel, and stoping early, leaving a small gap before the next eighth. You can even see the gap in the play page when switching between “played” and “notated” durations. Shouldn’t the G5 note be played longer to fill the ‘tuplet-feel’ of swing?
Adding a slur makes the G5 a bit longer but not long enough, and the gap is still very audible. Any help would be appreciated.
I find when writing jazz works I need to do a lot of tweaking of played durations in the key editor to get decent swing playback (perhaps especially because I use NotePerformer, which is great for “classical” but decidedly “square”).
In fact, if playback really matters, say if a group I’m writing for wants it, then I’ll copy the whole chart as a second flow in the project and add slurs and articulations that one wouldn’t normally put in a jazz chart.
Noteperformer reacts rhythmically to note position and length information it is given. It doesn’t generate any of its own rhythm, so has no effect on swing whatsoever. It has no control over being “square” or not.
He is pointing out that Dorico is not rendering the played note lengths to the proper value under these circumstances. The course of action here would be convince the Dorico team to fix the rendering method, rather than suggesting that the user pore over their score for every tied swung note to manually fix the durations to the expected value.
Thanks for your comments. I think it has nothing to do with the vsts/instruments, but instead, as VV1 writes, that Dorico isn’t rendering the tuplet feel correctly on some tied durations. I’m not using Note Perfomer either, but a mix of JABB and Steinberg sounds. Let’s see if someone from the Development team shows up.
Have you tried notating it as eighth-quarter (tied-eighths)-eighth? Assuming you’ve applied swing playback, I would expect that to give better results than using dotted eighths.
Which swing playback value did you apply in the tempo popover?
OT: since the OP doesn’t use NP, this won’t matter in terms of the question, but since you stated:
Here’s a pertinent demo of NP jazz playback done by @fredgunn:
I can only reply that in my work using NP, if I don’t manually adjust some played durations (for things likeshort quarters and “phat” marcato quarters) and add slurs and accents that are normally omitted from jazz scores/parts for being seen as unnecessary clutter (given swung playing stylistic assumptions), then the playback results are execrable. If I do, they’re not.
My understanding is that NP does, in fact, do under-the-hood “interpretive ‘humanization’” of rhythm, and it’s “classically” oriented. Do I understand incorrectly?
You can alter the duration also in the expression map (play mode, track inspector, ex.map click on the button right from the ex.map) > playback options overrides > default notes duration. The default is 95% in most expression maps.
on 1. no improvement here. The problem is with the first eighth of the second group (the second value of the tie).
on 2. I didn’t set the swing on a popover, but on the Playback Options Dialog (so project-wide). It’s set to medium swing 8ths. I could try with the popover or a different feel when I’m back home…
Thanks for the idea. I actually saw this option, but I don’t want the rest of the notes, that actually play correctly, to start playing on top of the following ones. I would need to probably input 120 or 125%, because the gap is so large, and this is a setting for all notes, if I’m correct.
You can give it a try. In NP I sometimes set it to 130% and it works. Don’t ask me why
Make sure that if you want it only in one instrument to make a copy of the Ex. Map and give that to that instrument otherwise all other instruments that use the Exmap behave also like that.
I tried both setting the Playback Options > Timing > Rhythmic Feel to Light swing 8ths and setting that back to Straight (no swing) (which I guess means we can keep the chaser…) and adding light swing 8ths via the Tempo popover. It made no difference to the sound of playback. (BTW, I switched to using a HALion piano since you’re not using NP. One bonus: unlike in NP, my shorter marcato quarters play back correctly!)
One interesting difference, though: when applying the Light swing 8ths via the Tempo popover, the Played Durations actually show the shift in the Key Editor:
“Curiouser and curiouser” (to me, at least)…. I don’t know if this has any connection to the behavior you’re observing, but figured it might be valuable to add.
Thanks for your engagement with this. Weirdly, I do see the change in the played durations when changing the Feel in the Playback options. Maybe once you use the popover (or once you have a Rhythmic Feel indication in the piece) the playback Options stops “working” because the object in the score has priority… idk.
Anyhow, I would really like to hear from the team. Right now this is not crucial for me, as I’m focused on the notation, but it would be nice if it worked correctly.
This actually kind of works! Thanks! It’s still just a workaround and not a fix, but a definite improvement. I think it works because the wind instruments in JABB are (normally) monophonic (as is the case in most libraries), so it can’t overlay two notes. Now everything sounds very legato, which is not ideal, but al least the gaps aren’t as noticeable using 110%. I will try on the weekend with a piano or a guitar to see what happens.
I’m still going to keep the post as unanswered, though, hoping that there is a proper solution.
So, the 110% makes everything sound very legato and is not really a solution. I’m in contact with someone from Steinberg about this. Will let you know what he says. I would still be nice if someone from the development team showed up…
EDIT: My contact in Steinberg doesn’t have a solution (he doesn’t work for the development team). Let’s hope he helps push the issue to them.
The dev team — identifiable by the Steinberg volume knob symbol in their picture/avatars — are regularly present here in the forum. This is the quickest way to bring a question or issue to their attention.
New thought, @Jorge_Vallejo, in response to another thread today. Is this something you brought into Dorico as a MIDI import or did you notate it from scratch in Dorico? (If a MIDI import, you could try selecting all of the notes and invoking Play > Reset Playback Overrides to see if it fixes things.
I started a solo piano project from scratch to test. Added a Medium Swing (Pop-over), and wrote 4 bars of offbeats and below a bunch of eighths. Bar 3 has slurs. Hier is a screen shot of bars 2 and 3 with the playback durations below. You can clearly see that, compared to the eighths, the offbeats are sometimes too short. but it is inconsistent. 1st and 3rd offbeats look good but 2nd and 4th don’t.
) and adding light swing 8ths via the Tempo popover. It made no difference to the sound of playback. (BTW, I switched to using a HALion piano since you’re not using NP. One bonus: unlike in NP, my shorter marcato quarters play back correctly!)
idk.
