Expression Maps

Dorico
179

Daniel,

For your collection of “things to improve with Expression maps”:

  1. I am glad that you recognize that support for multiple MIDI ports is essential. VSL freely allows mixing articulations in a player instance. Other libraries, like Orchestral Tools, separate things into Long and Short patches. You can’t add a pizzicato articulation to the “Long” patch. So, the only option in Dorico is to clutter the score with a Violin Short & Violin Long staff, which is not really desirable.

  2. Being able to see only a single controller lane in Play mode is quite limiting. In Cubase, I often have three or more open to be able to fully control a patch.

The whole thing is cumbersome enough (define a playing technique, define a playback technique, define an expression map and tie them all together) that Dorico will remain a NotePerformer environment for me, and all sample libraries will be accessed in Cubase.

I’m not sure that making articulations = playing techniques is the way to go. You have likely given it way more thought than me. I understand how it works, and it does put everything on the score. But a lot of orchestral library articulations are not separate playing techniques. They are just nuances of how a player would execute something, and would never be printed on a final score. Pizz. is a playing technique, but in Berlin Strings, the Portato Short and Portato Long articulations are just variations on a short/medium note, without legato transitions. I wouldn’t need a marking on the score for them, but I might want the playback to use one or the other to get a better expression on the line or a note. The playback bit really is separate from the score bit, and I think that separating these explicitly is not a bad thing. The score should be about instructions to a human player. The “Play” tab could be just about how to tell the computer to play it back. Cubase does this simply as articulations can change note by note in the piano roll editor. If you haven’t yet, you may want to speak to some media composers who regularly have to produce finished mockups. There is a whole workflow here, with its own pains and frustrations that you’ll no doubt run into as you expand this feature area over time.

I know the list is long. I guess like a lot of people, I would like a notation based DAW capable of full mockup. Cue unicorns and rainbow theme.

Thanks for all you doing. I do like the software a lot and use it daily. NotePerformer is fine for writing, but production has to go to Cubase, which is not the end of the world. It would just be faster to do it in one place.