Organ / Keyboard Particularities

I know! It’s the same for me. Clearly I’ve played both and never thought much of it. Then all of the sudden when I was forced to make an explicit decision about it I started wondering. There are so many aspects of music I’d never deeply pondered until I started engraving things myself. I also find loads of mistakes in old editions that I engrave too. It’s almost comical. I love finding the same material, pages later, notated differently than before, or measures that don’t have the correct number of beats… etc. You can also find times when the engraver made a mistake, and you know they knew, because they did something funny to mitigate the error without wanting to redo the whole plate. It really is fascinating.

Isn’t this what you wanted to achieve? The checked option in properties panel “Taktstrich verbindet alle Systeme” must be something like “Barline joins all staves” in English.

EDIT: Ah, I just realized my misunderstanding: This only works for organ solo but not, when there’s a solo instrument above.

Thomas

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At least it’s a good idea for organ solo!

There need to be some different ways of displaying how the 3-part organ grand staff shows. The default is good for pure organ music, but if you put this in an ensemble score, you get one staff that has no label and is not bracketed to anything else, so there is no way for the reader to tell what it represents. It is possible to re-do the bracket so it covers all three staves, and also re-do the barline joins, but then you have the instrument name at an odd level, and there is no way to consistently centralise it on the 3-part grand staff.

David, interestingly enough if you look at most modern organ music there is only a normal grand staff with an extra stave beneath, which, more often than not, does not have connected barlines to the grand staff (except at the very beginning of each stave). You can make the manual bracket change if desired already to put all three under the curly brace (which runs the risk of being confusing for those times when you need three staves for manuals).

I think the bigger issue is the fact that the pedal stave is not calculated in the spacing algorithms as belonging to the manuals, so the auto justify settings really muck things up sometimes. I think there needs to be a special setting in the vertical settings pane of the layout options dialogue just for organ to choose the desired distance between manuals and between manuals and pedal (which is often narrower).

I’m just going to drop this quote from another thread about organ pedaling here as well for anyone who might benefit.

Just in case this affects anyone in the future:

For all the organists out there that want more control over how their multi-manual setups interact with Dorico, features seem to be in the pipeline.

Would this include changing Midi channels for a given stave? i.e. top stave becomes the swell or solo manual, but then changes back a few measures later to the great. I’m totally new to Dorico, but as an organist/composer it’s a very necessary capability. btw: Dorico is totally amazing!!!
Thanks.

You can play back different voices on a staff on different MIDI channels.

That’s not “in the pipeline”, it is already in version 3.0.10.

That’s great news, thanks for letting me know. I’m assuming channels can be changed from one voice to another at any point along the score, not simply set at the beginning and no place else?

Thanks!

SInce the number of voices is unlimited, you will possibly find it easier to fix a channels to each voice and then substitute the voices where you need them to get the correct “stops.”

Yes, that’s the way you need to do it: one voice can be bound only to one specific endpoint, but you can have as many voices as you like, so you can use a new voice each time you need a new registration.

A little OT, has any of you organ players tried the new Organteq from Modartt (I think it’s been out for two days now) with Dorico? I’m curious to see if it’s as useful as Pianoteq…

I didn’t know it was released till I saw this thread.

I’ve persuaded the demo to map the three organ staves in Dorico onto two manuals and pedal (at least for single voices on each staff), which is a good start. Experimenting with the demo is a bit frustrating though because when it times out after 20 minutes you tend to lose whatever configuration you had.

It looks like it should be possible to create playing techniques for stop changes etc.

For some reason the standalone player isn’t generating any audio for me but IIRC I had the same problem with the standalone Pianoteq player until I did something that kicked it hard enough to make it remember what audio device it was supposed to be using. (But I’ve forgotten what the trick was…).

First impression of the sound: It’s got a French accent. Nothing wrong with that, but other European organ building flavours are available of course :slight_smile:

It’s version 1.0 so no doubt the range of tone colours will grow in future updates. There is no 32’ pedal in version 1, and (curious considering how French it is) no independent tierce mutation either, though there is a Cornet.

Only 10 stops per division might seem a bit miserly, but you can select any 10 from the complete list, and it has a full set of couplers.

The default reverb setting is huge and the user-contributed demos on the Modartt site seem to be using that, but that is easily changed if you don’t like it.

Probably something to buy for a Christmas present. If it follows the same path as Pianoteq, it will keep improving!

+1 and following

Speaking as a professional organist, I must say this was very disappointing soundwise. The principals and strings are totally lacking in character, and if anything, certainly not french sounding. And not very french looking (console layout) either… It is of course extremely impressive technologically, but fire up the Caen in HW as a comparison and…

I imagine that anyone who wants to do serious organ renders will use Hauptwerk via the vst link.

Edit: just listened to the demos and I think they are atrocious.

The only demo worth listening to for an idea what it sounds like is the Modartt video. I really can’t imagine why they posted the others.

Pianoteq 1.0 didn’t sound very good either, compared with the latest version. I guess it will improve with time.

Thanks, fellow Doricians! You’ve been very helpful :slight_smile: