Ways of globally influencing differences between dynamics

Dorico
1

In my current flow (I’m engraving a Baroque piece) there are only two dynamics: f and p. I would like for the playback difference between them to be quite small; smaller, in fact, than what I’m getting when I set the Dynamic curve power to 1 (setting it to something lower has to my ears no additional influence; I expected the function to be linear but with a different parameter…). Now, I know I can do it voice-by-voice and dynamic-change-by-dynamic-change using the Dynamics Lanes in the Play mode. But is it possible to do it via tweaking some global parameters?

2

Maybe try setting the min and max volume dynamic in the expression map? As far as I can tell, the curve you mentioned is going to use those values as its endpoints.

3

Thank you for the suggestion. To my amazement I discovered in Expression Maps → NotePerformer another Dynamic curve power setting. I set it to 1 and now it sounds better.

I’m completely new to this so I’d really appreciate pointers about the following:

  1. I don’t see ‘min and max volume dynamic’ settings in the NotePerformer expression map settings. Is that OK?
  2. If I’m using NotePerformer, does it mean that the usual Dynamic curve power from Playback → Playback Options does not work? I had set it to 1 and to my ears it had a different result than what I’m hearing now. I don’t want to trust my ears on this…
4

Every expression map has a section where it can override the defaults set in the “global” playback options. When you edit the expression map, this is in the “Playback Options Overrides” panel.

This is useful if you are using several different sample libraries, and they work best with different defaults for how to overlap legato notes, for example.

NotePerformer overrides every option to reset it to the factory-supplied defaults in Dorico, because it uses many of the options to drive its own internal algorithms.

You can change those overrides if you want, but there may be some side-effects to the NotePerformer playback. I don’t expect changing the dynamic curve would do anything disastrous, though.

5

Thank you!

But the bottom line as to my particular issue seems to be as follows: if I’m using NotePerformer and I’d like for the difference between p and f be less pronounced, the best I can do is to set the dynamic curve to 1 in the NotePerformer expression map settings. Is that correct?

6

Yes, that’s it.

7

Thank you!