Percussion sounds missing?

When I add the instrument “Tomtom (Mittel)” to my drum kit, I get a tomtom sound.
When I add the instrument “Tom (Mittel)” I don’t get any sound from it.

(I’m using German instrument names, hence the “Mittel” instead of “Mid”.)

Am I not to expect that all instruments have sounds associated to them?
What is the difference between the Tomtom and the Tom instrument?

I’m using a vanilla drum set with standrad percussion map and no other VST instrument, only the HALion that ships with Dorico.

Thanks, E.

(Speaking about drums, what is the difference between “Snare drum” and “Kleine Trommel”, which are the same to me?)

There is no difference between “Tom-tom” and “Tom”: they are the same instrument but shown with different names. Likewise “Kleine Trommel” and “Snare drum” are the same (in English you would find e.g. “Side drum” and “Snare drum”). When the same instrument is known by different names, we try to include all of the common names in the popover.

Hi, Daniel.
Thanks for your answer.

Then why is it that “Tomtom” does make a sound while “Tom” does not?

Hi.

I include an example of the non-sounding toms.

What I did:

  • Create a new empty Dorico document
  • Add a single player, choose “Create empty kit”
  • Add Tom (high) and Tom (low) as well as Tom-Tom (high) and Tom-Tom (low)
  • Enter some notes

Result: The first notes (Tom) do NOT sound, the last notes (Tom-Tom) do sound.

Please have a look at it :slight_smile:

(I do not own any special VST instruments, this is a vanilla Dorico installation.)

Thanks, E.
tom-tom-test.zip (310 KB)

My first reaction is that your Toms (when I downloaded and opened your file) were not assigned in Play to the HALion player.
But then, once I assigned them to the HALion player (channel 1, just like the Tom-Toms) I heard only clicks, not the Tom-Tom sounds, which is definitely a problem.

What I could not figure out was how one assigned an instrument to a specific GM instrument number, which is what seems the problem here. Am I missing a screen where one can do that?

Hi, Derrek.
Thanks for your response.
I added all the instruments in one go and never opened play mode or messed around in the HALion player.

I’m not saying you caused it; I’m just pointing out what I saw (and heard). Certainly something is going awry.

I’ve just been looking into this – it appears that there’s some missing data in the instruments database where ‘Toms’ are not inheriting the same properties as ‘Tom-toms’, and so Dorico doesn’t know how to play them back because the Percussion Map lists tom-toms rather than toms. We’ll fix the database for future versions, but for the moment you can get them to play back by opening the Percussion Map editor in Play Mode and changing the tom-tom entries to toms, and then choosing Play → Apply Default Template.

Alternatively you can create the kit with tom-toms and then rename them to toms. I think this may be the best option for the moment as it means playback will work as expected without needing to change the percussion maps.

Thanks, Paul, for looking into it.
One more Dorico riddle being resolved :wink:

Paul, while you’re at it, fixing the sounds for unpitched percussion, here is what I’ve found out, loading Doricos all unpitched percussion:
Marked instruments doesn’t sound at all

Regards Ulrik

Wow, ulrik, that’s quite a list you’ve worked on! Great job! :slight_smile:

Thanks for making the list Ulrik. We know the problem with Toms, but most of the other sounds don’t play back because there aren’t any samples for them. If you have a sample library that does have them then you can map them in the percussion map.

Hm…
Then why do you offer me 5 Temple Blocks, when there’s only sound for 4 of them…?
If I need a 5th or a 6th one, I can always use TB #4 and change the name…?

Because our research suggested that 5 line tempo block staves were common, but unfortunately we only have 4 samples in the HSO library. We choose not to restrict the choice of instruments to compose for on the basis of what we have or don’t have in the HSO/HSSE library.

I assume this might be related, but some of the toms are pitched wrong.

In a 5 stave TOMs stave, Toms 3 and 4 are pitched the same

and in a Drum Set (Basic) Toms 2 and 3 are pitched the same

they can be manually tuned in HalionSonic, but would be good if this can be resolved

Thank you Paul for the information.
Are there plans to include the missing samples in an update later? Or is Halion another product that doesn’t follow the needs of Dorico, but live it’s own life so to speak?

At the moment, Dorico uses some pre-existing sets of samples that are used by our other products, notably Cubase, but in the future it will be possible for us to augment those standard sets with new sounds. However, this is not something that you should expect to happen imminently.

Ok, that sounds promising, thank you for the information!

Regards Ulrik