Using Addictive Drums 2 with Dorico 2.2

I am trying to use Addictive Drums 2 in Dorico but I can’t seem to get it to work. Since SD2 is not GM-compatible, I have created a new Percussion Map with some of the basic sound I need. When I try to edit the Percussion Kit and pressing the + sign and then select Unpitched Percussion I get a loooong list of instruments to choose from but none of the names I defined in my Percussion Map is to be found. I can’t for the life of me figure out what I am doing wrong. In one of the YouTube Hangouts I saw John Barron do the same thing but the list was just showing the sound from the Percussion Map he had just defined. Am I missing something here?

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My best result with AD2 (both in Finale and Dorico) has been to set the instruments in the various AD slots and then map the notes you want to the slots rather than to the MIDI numbers on the chart. I’ve never been able to get mapping directly to the MIDI numbers to work; perhaps they exist to allow one to assign sounds to the various AD slots via CC actions.

If anyone knows more about the in’s and out’s of AD programming, I’d love to get better at it.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by setting the instruments in the AD slots and then map the notes.

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In the percussion map, you’re defining both the Instrument and the playing technique that each MIDI note in the patch you’re using produces. So you might take, for example, the snare drum, and assign the ‘Natural’ playing technique to (say) note 36 in your percussion map. Now when you create your percussion kit, if you add a snare drum instrument to it, the normal hit on a snare drum, which uses the playing technique ‘Natural’, will trigger note 36 on playback, provided you have also assigned your new percussion map to the appropriate channel in the Endpoint Setup dialog in Play mode.

If, say, a side stick is on note 38 in your patch, then you can make Dorico trigger that sound by selecting the snare drum in your percussion kit and clicking the Edit Percussion Playing Techniques button, and making sure that the ‘Side stick’ playing technique is defined for a specific notehead or articulation.

All of this sounds more complicated than it really is. We are planning a more detailed series of videos for working with percussion soon to try to demystify some of these workflows.

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While I find most of the features in Dorico 2.2 intuitive and easy to use, the handling of drum notation seems unnecessary complicated to me. It seems that all the tools are there but the way they behave just makes me confused and frustrated. I will give you an example: I have made a Percussion Map for my Addictive Drums 2 plugin with just a few necessary instruments I need to notate most rhythms. Consulting the AD2 keymap I find that the kick I want to use is on midi note #36. That is also what I defined in the AD2 Percussion Map. I then try to assign this kick to a space in the Percussion Kit but somehow it ends up on a much higher midi note than #36. WHY! It would be so much easier if the kick was at the same position (#36) and Dorico would then make sure it ended up in the space I have already defined in the Percussion Kit. As it is now I have to relearn where on my midi keyboard the kick actually is. I find this very cumbersome and unintuitive. Also when I add an instrument in the Percussion Kit I have to select Unpitched Percussion and go through an extremely long list of percussion in order to find the ones I need. There really should be another menu item below with just the instruments I defined in the Percussion Map. It would make it so much easier. In the list now are hundreds of instruments I will never need to use.

I’ve merged this post with your existing thread about using Addictive Drums 2.

Take a look at the ‘Percussion Input’ section of the ‘Note Input and Editing’ page of Preferences: there, you can set ‘Input onto kit or grid’ to ‘Use percussion map’, which will allow you to play directly the note on your MIDI keyboard that produces the sound you expect to hear, and will notate it in the right place.

Your suggestion to show only the instruments mapped in a particular percussion map when you are creating a kit is an interesting one, but Dorico wouldn’t actually know which percussion map to use automatically, since a single percussion kit can trigger sounds in multiple percussion maps. But it might be possible for us to add a filter to the dialog to allow you to show only those instruments mapped in a percussion map of your choosing, which I’ll think about.

Your suggestion worked… Kind of… I can now play the different drum sounds where they actually are mapped in AD2. But there are still two things that makes it a little frustrating. When entering notes I can hear the sounds but when playing back nothing is heard. Also when pressing other keys on my midi keyboard than those defined in the Percussion Kit, it still notates them and put them all over the place. The most important thing though is the playback. Look at the enclosed screen shots:

Here’s the Percussion Kit


And here’s the result

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Playback is working now. I just forgot to define AD2 for each drum sound in playback :slight_smile:

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