@DirkMM said:
"But you can always go into the Synchron player and rebalance the individual articulations with respect to each other. " I didn't know of this possibility, but I was hoping that something like that would be available. Can you tell me how to do that?
You select something like "Short Notes", go to "Edit" and bring down the fader. This will make the short notes quieter. If this adjustment for short notes makes, say "Spiccato" too quiet, you could go down one level into the Spiccato folder, and bring up the fader there. So you have fader controls over multiple levels.
Unfortunately, the fader affects all dynamics equally, so in the event that the loudest notes are correctly matched and only the quiet notes are too loud, bringing down the fader may fix the quieter notes but make the loudest notes too quiet in the short forms. There will not be a good fix for this that I am aware of, because currently VSL does not seem to give access to the crossfade curves between layers or amplitudes for individual layers. I am hoping that we will eventually get more powerful curve editors similar to what is present in the Synchron Pianos.
@DirkMM said:
like I described, the 3 louder notes realize 2/3 of the crescendo. Do you really here a normal crescendo?
The crescendo sounds fine on my end as I said, but I'm also aware that Duality Strings Regular has no layers below about pp or p, so once it gets down to somewhere around pp or p it can't get any quieter really (CC1 values between 1 and about 30 or so will all sound pretty much the same), and so I know that and given those constraints it sounds pretty good. Since you are coming from Cubase, I would have expected you to be aware of these limitations, since you would have had them in a DAW as well. The official solution is either to use CC11 automation or timbre adjust automation to bring the volume down once it gets down below p, but this has to be drawn in manually in the CC curve editor in Dorico and cannot be automated at the present time. I had previously asked VSL for a "niente" feature like some other vendors have to handle these quieter bits, where it would automatically fade out to nothing at the bottom end, as a way to solve this bottom layer stuff, but they seemed reluctant to implement this type of feature.
If you have Duality Colors as well, there is an alternative way of handling the lower layers - you can use the flautando legato for p or lower and then switch to ord. above p, by adding playing techniques to the passage in Dorico and hiding them so they affect playback without appearing in the score. This allows you to get quieter dynamics than p without having to go into the CC editor lanes in Dorico.
@DirkMM said:
And BTW, isn't it possible to make personal adjustments to the Expression Maps? Maybe that would be an even more powerfull method to achieve my goal, than making adjustments in the Synchron Player.
This would be the case if expression maps were very powerful, but they are not. Expression maps are designed with the idea that vendors have already pre-balanced all of the articulations with respect to each other correctly within the player itself. If this is not the case they have very limited capability to rebalance articulations.
The only per-articulation control that you have in Dorico expression maps that has the capability to rebalance articulations with respect to each other is the range for the velocity values. For instance, here I could go into Staccato in the expression map and set the max to 100 instead of 127:
But in practice this would not be a good solution as it then prevents you from using the loudest dynamics of the instrument, so I do not use this myself, as tempting as it is.
If they allowed dynamic curve control per articulation, this could be a solution, but currently they only provide a single dynamic curve control for the instrument as a whole (all articulations together).
You could ask the Dorico team to provide this dynamic curve per articulation, but they would probably tell you that you should just contact the vendor and get them to balance their articulations properly in the sample library programming to begin with.
Expression Maps are not as powerful as you seem to think - they are actually quite simple. You might be expecting much more intelligence there than actually exists. Making them too powerful would reduce performance too much in Dorico, even for note entry operations, so they have to keep them simple and limited in scope for those reasons. The player is often the best place to implement these fixes and not the expression maps.
