I am composing a work for violin and viola and so far, they are both notated as con sordino from the beginning. I’m using Noteperformer and the playback is really good. But I noticed in the violin, after a short section playing col legno, the Arco marking at the end of measure 13 made those notes a bit louder. I then noticed in Play Mode that “muted” is no longer indicated in the track. Same with the cello in measure 18 below. Nor does “ord” change this behavior; the mute is still gone. Any way to fix this other than, perhaps, to keep adding “con sord” and then hiding the marking? I read that there is a difference between arco/ord and “nat,” where the latter clears everything, but I’m specifically indicating Arco or Ord as appropriate, and don’t use Naturale in any of my scores, so I’m baffled. Thanks. File attached.
Looks like a bug, or a very serious oversight in NotePerformer. In your sample, violin, at the end of bar 13, I tried replacing “arco” with “con sord”, “mute”, and “mute on”. In the Player’s violin Playing Techniques track, each of these deleted the “Natural” playing technique there and also deleted the following “Sul ponticello” playing technique at bar 15. You get “Col legno battuto + Muted” all the way from bar 12 to bar 19.
Thanks. What finally worked for me was to add “con sord” to any instances of arco or ord and that seems to have worked. I’ll let the team at NP know-they’re pretty responsive.
I did reach out to Wallander, who responded very quickly but sadly, it is not an issue with NP but with Dorico, and the only solution is what I did, namely to have hidden con sord markings.
As noted by Wallander, “Dorico is indeed treating arco as an alias for Natural, which resets the playing technique. Since Dorico maps “arco” and “nat.” to the same underlying playback technique, it clears con sord. even when that isn’t the intention. You can see …in Edit Playing Techniques, where Arco appears as an alias for Natural.
Because this behavior comes from Dorico’s articulation system, there isn’t anything we can adjust on our side. For now, using a hidden con sord. marking is the only dependable way to keep strings muted throughout the passage.
If this could somehow be corrected it would be within Dorico, either through the Expression Map or the articulation settings. Unfortunately, we don’t know how/if that could be done.”
So it’s apparently an issue with Dorico, rather than NP.
Eh? Dorico maps arco to bowed playback technique. And surely the fact that the NP Expression Map has no entry for arco is going to lead to confusion. I must be missing something here as I don’t see why it’s Dorico’s fault. To me, it would be logical to programme con sord if it’s applied globally, as an add-on (which is what I’ve done in appropriate libraries) so it’s not cancelled out by a playing technique change within con sord but obviously NP has its own way of doing things.
indeed – I wasn’t getting at you but merely question what Wallander said as I think this requires clarification. As far as I know, there is no better solution to this problem than what has already been done. Although I normally write my own Expression maps, I wouldn’t dream of doing that for NotePerfomer as it’s a law unto itself, so to speak.
