I understand that unpitched percussion has not yet been (fully) implemented in Dorico. As I’ve looked for a workaround, I noticed that the Latin Percussion program (not sure if this exists within Halion Sonic SE, Halion Symphonic Orchestra, or General Midi) has many (maybe most) of the sounds I need. That said, I can’t figure out how to assign the various sounds to a staff.
I would have thought, in my ignorance that…
…I could choose Latin Percussion as an instrument, have a staff appear, and choose “pitches” associated with the sound I need (e.g. wind chimes on piano key c6), (but if I choose an instrument that exists within the Latin Percussion program, it seems only that instrument’s sound is available to notate for in Writing Mode), or
…I could choose Wind Chimes in the instrument selection dialogue within Setup Mode (but I can’t find where “Wind Chimes” or similar is available), or
…I could choose Guiro, for example, which exists within the Latin Percussion program, and then go to the Media Browser editor and change the designated key to that associated with Wind Chimes (but I don’t see a work flow for this).
Are all these trails way off base? or is one of them close? …or is there not trail for this “workaround”.
Percussion is not currently implemented at all, however we’re working hard on it for the next update. In the meantime you won’t be able to get any sensible playback without a lot of extra work. We’re aiming to have quite flexible playback so that a percussion kit can be played via multiple channels if required.
Thanks for that information! It’s at least comforting to know I’m not going nuts…or am I???
…in any case, I do have a follow up. Is it possible to use other sound libraries that have percussion kits and access those for playback, or, as I suspect, is it the playback implementation of Dorico, itself, that stands in the way right now?
Thank you for correcting my language. You put it more precisely than I did, and your statement is what I meant, or at least what I was referring to, in the a previous post (“Percussion is not currently implemented at all”).
However, it would seem there is some playback implementation, deliberate or incidental, of untuned percussion since I’ve notated some, and it has played back in Dorico reliably. I wanted to upload a short video, but I was unable to do that, so I have included a screenshot and a description of what I heard.
The playback was of various untuned percussion sounding. I tried several staves and repeated notes and all seemed to play back reliably. Halion showed “Latin Percussion” in the program list. The result implies that one of the workflows I mentioned earlier in this thread would be useful, that is, write for “Guiro” by using, just for hypothetical example, the note A; for cymbals the note “B”, etc. Not sure why I was not able to get to this work flow before; probably user error.
I could write all the untuned percussion on one staff, or I could write all the Guiro part on an A in one staff and all the Cymbals part on B in another staff, then I might try to alter the appearance of the staves to show all pitches on a 1-line staff (but not sure Dorico can do that).
It is certainly possible to get single-line percussion instruments to play back, however getting them to play back the correct key in the patch is a bit more work. You would have to open Halion Sonic SE and apply a transposition to get to the correct note. However, playback of multi-line staves such as drum kits, multiple tom-toms, woodblocks etc won’t work at the moment. It may be possible to get them to play back in a very crude way, but to be honest I think it could lead to a lot of wasted time. Our hope is that when we’ve got percussion in the next update that percussion will ‘just work’. The data model we have for ‘kit’ or multi-line percussion though is very different to a regular 5 line stave. If you spend a long time creating a ‘kit’ in this version then it may not be possible to automatically convert it to the new model.
I don’t know why I couldn’t get this to work before, but now a very workable workflow is …working for me.
I wrote for “Guiro”.
I typed the letter key for the sound I wanted. (It will take me mapping out what key plays what sound. Does anyone know where Latin Percussion key-to-sound map is online?)
If I want to change the sound, I can go to the piano roll in Play Mode and drag the “colored sound block” to a new key for the sound I want.
Then in setup I can rename the player/instrument to represent the new sound.
I’m going to try this again on a new document to see if I can repeat this workflow reliably or if it was a fluke. Will report back.
Has this been implemented in Dorico 3 yet? If so, please let me know! How would I get the Latin Percussion instruments into a drum kit to drag them around to the staff line I want? Is that possible?
I am talking Dorico Halion Latin Percussion. THANKS!!!
Percussion support was added way back in version 1.2, at the end of 2017, but the main issue with using the Latin Percussion Kit in HALion Sonic SE 3 is the lack of a suitable percussion map. I will come back to you on how to approach this as soon as I can.
Thank you for the GM Percussion Map.
I do wish somewhere on these maps the map-makers would mark one of the C’s as MIDI 60 so we could easily deduce the correct interpretation of the octaves.
