Use pitch bend for microtonal playback

Dorico
1

Since it seems unlikely that Kontakt will support note expression at any time in the foreseeable future, what are the chances that we might get the option to use pitch bend to accomplish microtonal playback in Dorico?
Thanks,
John

2

Welcome to the forum, John. We have no plans to use pitch bend for microtonal playback: please write to NI and let them know that making Kontakt VST 3 compatible and supporting note expression, or supporting the VST detune parameter in VST 2.x, is important to you.

3

Thanks, Daniel,
I have found that I can, in fact, use the midi pitch bend lane to accomplish this. What would be nice is a plugin like Sibelius that would automatically add the pitch bend data based on the microtonal accidentals. Hopefully, that will be possible in the future. For the most part, I really like Dorico and am looking forward to future updates. I am happy to wait for well-designed features.
Thanks, again,
John

4

I agree that Dorico should be able to handle more tuning methods than just the VST parameters. The VST tuning stays inside Dorico: a MIDI file exported from Dorico does not contain it, and in Cubase, the only DAW with those parameters, it is not even possible to edit the VST parameter at the same precision as in Dorico.

5

Hi Daniel,

Is it still the case that Dorico doesn’t support the use of pitch bend for microtonal playback, i.e. by sending pitch bend information linked to microtonal accidentals? And is there no intention is for it to support it in version 4? I would very much like to use the crossgrade offer to jump from Finale, but unless I can easily send microtonal information to VSL and Kontakt (which don’t seem to support VST3 Expression or Detune), it won’t work for my music. With Finale I use Expressions linked to pitch bend to play quatertones, which works well. The use of midi lanes as described above would seem impractical for fast passages of accidentals. Is there any hope here?

Thanks,
Andy

6

Welcome to the forum, Andy. It is indeed the case that at present Dorico does not use MIDI pitch bend for microtonal playback, and there are no changes in this regard in the forthcoming Dorico 4.0 release. However, we certainly don’t rule out making changes in this area in future, but I can’t say for sure when we will be able to implement these changes.

7

Thanks for your reply, Daniel. It’s good to know that this is a possibility going forward. It would certainly allow potential users such as myself to use the many orchestral libraries that do not support the VST options to engage with Dorico for microtonal playback, as well as allowing easy export of pitch data to DAWs. With regard to contemporary music, it’s great to see Dorico’s feature set growing, including those important graphical elements.

I will watch out for updates!

Thanks,
Andy

8

Hi Daniel,

I wonder if there is an update to the possibility of using pitch bend to address microtones in Dorico? Talking to other composers at various festivals this year, they would like the same functionality and see it as a pathway to using the software. I’d certainly still like to make use of the crossgrade offer! Is it on the cards?

Thanks,
Andy

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9

It’s not something we have worked on as yet, I’m afraid, but I know it is something that some users (and prospective users) are waiting for.

10

Thanks for your reply, Daniel. Hopefully it won’t be too long a wait…

11

Hi Daniel,

Having bought Dorico way back during the Black Friday sale, I finally finished a long term project in Finale and I’ve been spending time with Dorico over the last week or so. I’ve been very impressed by its ease of use and depth, and the only issue for me was using my libraries microtonally. What a great surprise that microtonal pitch bend playback is implemented in Dorico 5! I look forward to upgrading this weekend and trying it out.

Thank you so much!
Andy

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