Hello everyone.
I’m using piccolo trumpet in Bb in a project, and I noticed Dorico uses the same transposition as regular trumpets (2nd lower). Piccolo trumpets are supposed to transpose up a minor 7th, an octave higher than regular trumpet, right? Is there any way to change the transposition behavior of an instrument?
Thank you!
There’s not a way to change the transposition of an instrument, no. You’d need to find an instrument with the desired transposition and edit both its name and its VST routing.
I’m not at my computer right now, but I believe there’s a Trumpet in D.
Soprillo Saxophone uses the transposition you need, assuming Dorico is correct in this matter.
I just started a new test project and added a piccolo trumpet, and the transposition works as expected, sounding a minor 7th higher. This is Dorico 3; but I have an older piece I wrote in Dorico 1.2 with piccolo trumpet, and its transposition also worked as expected (and still does, I just opened it again). So I’m not sure why your piccolo trumpet is behaving differently. Maybe you imported from xml?
There was a recent thread where it was discovered that if you have an old project with an incorrect transposition, it’s quite hard to get rid of that because it seems to be “baked in” to the instrument definitions stored in the project. For example creating a new piccolo trumpet in the old project probably won’t make any difference.
Thanks for all the comments! After what I read here I tried creating another instrument from scratch and it came with the right transposition. At first, I replaced a clarinet with the Piccolo Trumpet, so I’m assuming it kept the transposition of the previous instrument. It’s working now, anyway!.
What appears in your instruments.xml file? The transposition for the Piccolo Trumpet in Bb should look something like this:
If it somehow got changed, try editing the file and see if it affects the transposition. (Make a backup of your instruments.xml first obviously)