Build a Custom Orchestral Playback Template in Dorico

1. Introduction: Thank you so much for checking out my course. My name is Will, and I've been working with Darko for many years. I'm a professional composer and orchestrator. And what I'm going to be showing you in the next several lessons is how to build your own playback template. This is useful for composers, for producers, anybody who wants to get the notation in Darko to sound great coming through their sample libraries on their computer. So we're going to talk about building out a switching structure, whether you're using key switching, channel switching, I'm going to cover how that works and how you can configure it. We're going to talk about endpoints, what endpoint configurations are, and then how to use ports and how to use channels and how to make sure you have a naming convention that works well and how to also build that into unique projects to encourage a more reliable outcome, but also streamline the troubleshooting process ifever you need to make changes or fix problems in your endpoint your playback templates. We're going to talk about expression maps and percussion maps, which are a huge topic and really crucial to getting your playback templates to work correctly and sound great. These are all features of Darko that have been around since the beginning, but often elude composers and producers who don't have time to get into the sort of minutia of how these features work. I'm not only going to present how they work, but I'm also going to show you how you can use them in your workflow to create a really robust, easy to troubleshoot and reliable quality mock up so that your music sounds the best when it comes out the other end of Darko, okay? So we're going to talk about all those things, and at the very end, I'm going to actually walk you through building your own playback template with whatever library you want to use, we are going to be demonstrating here with the Berlin Free Orchestra. And I am presenting here with Darko five Pro. Really, as long as you're using some version of Dorko and you have a sound library that you want to get started with as a composer, as a producer, this course is going to take you 0-60, understanding exactly how all that works and getting you up and running confidently so you can work independently with your own libraries, okay? So thanks so much for checking out my course. I'm glad you're here, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 2. Design Your Custom Orchestral Template: To get started here, we want to do a little bit of preliminary planning, okay? Now, I've got four kind of bullet points over here that I want you to consider as you start out on this plan. What library or libraries do you want to use? What kind of instrumentation are you looking for? Is this strict orchestral? Is it hybrid orchestral, et cetera? Think about that up front. Organizing into sections. So we may have, for example, strings winds brass. That would be typical. But maybe we have regular orchestral percussion, and then we have hand percussion. Think about sections and families of instruments that you are going to want to use. That's important at the outset. And then playback techniques because playback techniques are essentially the link between what's in your score and what gets triggered in your sample library. So without a playback technique, you can't add something into an expression map, and without an expression map, you can't trigger some kind of sound from your score. So it's helpful to think about if there are any playback techniques that you might need. So, for example, pizzicato, staccato, these are going to be built in to Darko already, right? But you may have more rare, more unique, you know, like, let's say, Tremolo Pizzcato, something like that, which is in one of my more advanced Berlin libraries. That's not standard. So I want to register that I'm going to want that articulation, and I want to make sure there's a playback technique loaded in to the playback techniques. I'll show you just quickly kind of how you do that. I don't want to do too much of a demo here. But if you go up to the library menu down to playback techniques, okay? And you just simply you can scroll through this list. You can look through the subgroups, and then you just click Plus and you add whatever you need, okay? So it's very easy to go ahead and add playback techniques. That's all that's involved. You don't have to do any other connections, but make sure there's a playback technique for each one that you're going to want to use. Now, in terms of the library, for the purposes of this module, I'm going to focus on using the Berlin free orchestra. So there's a few reasons for this. First of all, it is actually a pretty good library. It's got true legato on the violin, the celllo, the flute, and the clarinet. It has some nice ensemble patches. It's got decent solo brass winds and strings. And it's got enough articulations that you can make music with it that isn't too constrained. But it's also kind of lightweight enough that we're not going to get mired in details. I don't There's a big risk in demonstrating all the things I'm going to be demonstrating from playback templates to endpoints, expression maps, percussion maps, playback techniques. If you go and dive into a truly pro library, like, you know, VSL or the Full Berlin series, you can just get miired in details, and I think that actually would be distracting. I'm sure some people would value going through step by step like that. I'm going to try and go step by step through the process, not necessarily every articulation one after another. So we really just need a practical example, and the Berlin Free orchestra gives us that. As far as sections and instruments, I'm going to be focusing on a sort of traditional orchestra here, so winds and strings and brass, and then percussion and pitched percussion, separating out things like Timpani and Glockenspiel from drums, okay? So I'm going to show you over the course of the next several lessons how you can take a library like the Berlin free orchestra and build it out into an actual playback template that works reliably across your score and that it's all been set up in the way that Darko intends. And this is if you're new to this, you're going to come out on the other end, really having a nice, deep, confident understanding of how all this stuff works. So let's head into the next lesson and I'll get started building. 3. Map Out Your Switching Logic: As we start to actually build out our playback template, there are going to be immediate barriers if we don't have our playback techniques set up. So as I mentioned in the last lesson, you can go on up to here to the library menu. Sorry, there's a menu stuck there. And you go down to playback techniques, like so. Alright. And then you can add anything in here you need, and you can check everything that you need. Now, I'm going to need things like legato, staccato, so we can just kind of scan through here. You know, you can see that legato is not in techniques. It's under lengths, probably. There's legato. There's spiccato and staccato, again, under lengths. So maybe tremolos under ornaments, probably. We have tremolo and trills, right? So if you're applying the model that we're about to discuss onto a much more complicated library, besides Berlin free orchestra, then you're going to want to go in here and make sure that you've got all your playback techniques set up. Um, the next thing is considering whether or not these are base switches or add ons. And let me switch back here and show you this worksheet. I'm going to highly recommend you fill out this worksheet as a step before you finish this video or before you move on to the next lesson. This is you can download this along with the module. It's um I think it's blank, the copy that I'm giving you. And you want to start with what are your families, right? What are your instrument sections up here? So I've got winds and brass and pitched percussion, percussion and strings, but you may have other families. You may have, like, hybrid percussion. You know, maybe you're writing some sort of ethnic style. So you need Irish instruments, or you need Middle Eastern instruments, something like that. So you want to figure out what your families are. And then how many ports you need is variable. I tend to structure my switching structure such that midi ports switch instruments, and each one of these families is an instance in Vienna Ensemble Pro or VE Pro. By having the instance contain a family and having each instrument assigned to a port, it's very easy and reliable. Address a specific instrument before I've even used mini CCs or channels because I'm using instances and ports. So it's a really nice way to go. So that's what I've done here. I've assigned, you know, just these ports down the left hand side. You can see the most that I'm using is in the winds, and that's because I've got all of these instruments. But what this means is that in Vienna Ensemble Pro, MIDI that goes out to port two on the winds instance in VE Pro is always going to be sent to flute. And then whatever channel channel it's on, excuse me, will eventually determine the articulation. And then MIDI CCs are used for things like add ons, maybe consortino vibrato, things like that, okay? So if you have questions, of course, in building out your own system, by all means, contact me through the Q&A. I do check that and get back to people. But I'm hoping that in this lesson and the rest of the lessons in this module, I'm going to walk you through this in such close detail that you should be able to follow along. Um, mutual exclusion groups are one other thing that you probably just want to think a little bit about. I tend to write my mutual exclusion groups into the expression maps in Darko as needed. So when two add ons typically apply at the same time, let's say I have an add on for soft and an add on for bold because maybe I have a soft sustain and a bold sustain sample, something like that in a more mature library. I don't want soft and bold, obviously, to apply at the same time, and I may encounter that, and DACO will give me an unreliable or inconsistent result. That's when I would go in and I would create a mutual exclusion group. And that looks like this. When you're in the expression maps, and you're looking at an expression map like this one here, you can actually go down to mutual exclusion groups. And right here, you can see, for example, there's an automatic one that you can't play legato and non legato at the same time. So if I mark something as legato or non legato, they'll never stack on top of each other. They'll always be mutually exclusive. And that's how I approach that kind of wait until there's a problem, and then I fix it with a mutual exclusion group. Good to know that that's the right solution. Um but maybe in the planning phase here also gives some thought to ways in which mutual exclusion groups may help you and know that they exist if you wind up in a situation where you're wondering what to make an add on, what to make a base switch. So that brings us to this topic of base switches versus add ons. Now, in my PDF here that I'm going to recommend that you fill out, the base switches down here in this table, these are all of the main articulations. These are unique articulations that are unique unto themselves. They don't stack. Neither one is really an add on to the other. I suppose legato could technically be, you know, maybe applied to sustains and tremolo. But I tend to put legato on its own base switch because I want to be able to not all patches will have legato. Um so, for example, there may be a spiccato patch that has legato transitions, but the staccato patch it doesn't maybe there's a martil patch that does, and the staccato doesn't like that. And as I've built many playback templates now, I've learned that it's good to have the fundamental natural and legato, the detach or legato be two different channels, have those go out on two different midi channels. Now, they will exist on the same port because I'm going to have sustained piccolo and legato piccolo, sustained flute and legato flute, right? You're going to see how the base switches get applied using channels, but the instrument is selected using ports. Alright, so filling out this spreadsheet over here is a great preliminary step to take when you're planning. And I just have at the bottom here, my base switches. Now, a NIT is something that every expression map is going to have, I think, by default, and if it doesn't, it's a good idea to add it, but I think it's there by default. And it's basically a way for you to say, I no other articulation has been applied, what do I want to hear? And without it, sometimes you might not hear anything. So a nit is not really a technique as much as kind of a software hack. And then Natural legato, staacato, spigoto, pizzicato, and tremolo, these are the only articulations that are available in the Berlin free orchestra, which, as I said in the last lessons is one of the reasons I chose it because we're keeping the scale and scope of what we're trying to achieve to a degree that's manageable, but still realistic. These are still very useful set of articulations. But if you're using cinematic studio strings, or using the full Berlin series or VSL or more advanced spitfire libraries, for example, you're of course, going to find that you have loads and loads and loads of base switches in addition to add ons. Now, I'm not using any add ons over here. My add ons tables are empty. This is where I'd put maybe soft and bold, long and short. I might put in things over here like forte piano. I might put things like, um, you know, might have hemlo as an add on to add to pizzicato, something like that. So there's not enough diversity in the Berlin free orchestra to warrant using add ons quite yet, but there certainly are some good foundational bass switches. And I would recommend that when it comes to thinking about how you're differentiating bass switches from add ons, just remember that bass switches always replace each other. Add ons don't. So a base switch should be something that's totally unique. In other words, you're never going to play pizzicato and Spicado at the same time. It's not going to happen. You're not going to play portado and marcato at the same time, at least not in the sample world. You're not going to play tremolo and pizzicato at the same time. So these are completely unique, then you want them to be a base switch. If they're not completely unique, like, let's say, consortina with a mute, you could play brass with the mute, you could play strings with a mute, and you could play pizzicato with a mute mute. You could play spiccato or staccato or sustains with a mute, right? You could play mart with a mute. So the fact is the mute is not a mutually exclusive technique. It is a playing technique, and you need to have it registered as a playing technique in order for it to be incorporated into your expression map, but you do not need to set it up as a base switch. You want to set it up as an add on. And so in my worksheet here, you'll notice that the fundamental base switch is they get a channel and then I always give them the CC 70 value of zero. Now why CC 70? That's just because in the let me bring over my window here for you. In Vienna Ensemble Pro, if I load up, let's say, the solo French horn here, Okay. The reason that I have CC 70 here is that in the sign player, which is Orchestral tools sample player, it kind of replaces contact, and it's their own proprietary sample player. You'll find that in the Options tab over here, the default articulation switch is set to CC 70. That means that if you want to change an articulation using a mini CC value, which we do want to do, ultimately, then that CC value has to be set on CC 70. You can change this to another CC if you want, but I would just keep it at 70. And that's why this is set CC 70 and zero because essentially what I'm saying is the basic legato sustain, that's going to be on zero. The basic staccato is on zero. I may have a consortino staccato that's got a different midi CC value, but zero is always the default sort of that's the default home based articulation. The channels are choosing between articulations between base switches, okay? Now, above that here, I've got conditional, and we'll be getting into this a little bit later in the module, but conditional base switches have to do with note length. And I actually have some setup in this example. So, um, I'll show you what it looks like. Then I'll explain what it does, and then I'll play it for you so you can put it all together. So you can see that I've got them here. Now, I put this little sort of wiggly line, the Tilda, technically, what that character is called. I have that there to remind me when I see it anywhere in Darko that it's not actually an articulation, it's condition based. And what does that mean? It means that it has a condition assigned to it. In this case, that the note length is equal to medium. Now, there's only five note lengths, and I have one base switch for each one. I have very long VL, long LG, medium, MD, short, and very short. And the D, in my case stands for detached as opposed to legato. I will often create more. I'll basically duplicate these, and they will I'll put a little L there instead of D, and then I can see that it's legato. So let's talk a little bit about why I would do this. The reason that I would do this is that I want these 16th notes. Let me go to the flute. I want these 16th notes to play in a shorter articulation automatically just because they're short because I know that's what a flute player would do. I don't want sort of like a tenuto quality on 16th notes. I want punchy, right? Similar with an eighth. So maybe I would like these to be ideally very short staccatos. This would be staccato, a quarter note. I would like it maybe to play sustain. And then for whole half notes, maybe the same, if I had a more mature library, maybe I would want like an expressive patch on a whole note. Anyway, using conditional conditional articulations in my expression map allows me to tell Darko that when a note's length is a certain length that I want to trigger a specific sample. So the way that I do that, I think this is the most efficient way. So channel one, the reason this says one slash two is because, uh, detached is always on channel one. Legato is on Channel two, so you can see detached and Legato one and two. That's what's going on there. Now, if the notes very long, then I want to send a CC 70 value of one, which would change this zero to one. And then if I'm sending a one, then I want to play a different sample. Now, if we were to look at Vienna, sorry, VP here, and we were to look back at my flute you'll see that I've actually set these up with CC values. If you're getting key switches, you just right click on the group and you select use CC switches, and then you can set the CC switch to anything that you want that hasn't already been selected, okay? So, essentially, since there are not a whole lot of articulations available on the Berlin free orchestra, I've said, very long should play a sustain, Long should play a sustain, medium should play a sustain. Short should play a staccato short and very short should also play a staccato short. That's just because I don't have other articulations. If I had a staccatissimo, I might have staccatissimo on CC value five and staccato on value four. You know, I might have portado on three. I might have sustain on four and Esprasivo on one or sorry, sorry, I misnumbered them. I might have sustain on two and then Esprasivo on one. And in that way, I can kind of get Darko to automatically trigger different samples just based on the note length. Why would I want to do that? Well, because I don't want to have to go in here and say, you know, Oh, I want these to be Spicado you know, and it's just for these two notes. And then I want that to be staccato. And then, you know, I want this to be tenuto, you know, then I have to kind of, like, go and make some marking this is Espresvo. And then you wind up with this score, which might play back correctly. But it's going to be less readable for a player. If you do ultimately hire live players, it can be a drag to then go in and remove all that stuff, and then you're wondering, you know, if it's going to ruin your mockup playback and things like that. So by setting up these conditional these conditional articulations, you can get that sort of sporty playback without having to clutter your score with a whole bunch of junk like that. Okay, let me just undo all that stuff. And then let me just show you how I go about creating those. Okay. So if I'm in the expression map, and I'm going to wrap up very soon because I don't want the video to go on too long. So I would add a base switch, and I would go for natural, right? So natural, which is the same as sustain. And that creates another natural, but I can rename that whatever I want, right? So I could rename this. Let's say that I were well, I'll just go with detached, right? But if I was doing Legato, I might type an L, doing detached, so I'll say, you know, very short, something like that. And you'll see that the name changes over here. But it's still triggering a natural articulation. If you double click on it, you'll still see that natural is what's selected there. Okay. And then I can come down here and add a condition where since that's VS for very short, I would say note length equals very short. And then very short notes will trigger here, and I can decide what channel and what mid CC value and so on and so forth to send. So that's how those are set up. Let me go ahead and think I can go ahead and just discard changes. Now, I've discussed a lot here, playback techniques, make sure you got them all listed out. Fill out the worksheet for base switches and add ons. Give us some consideration of mutual exclusion groups, but I do tend to fill those out over time. Build out the worksheet, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Build a Complete Section Endpoint: I am using Vienna Ensemble Pro for the demonstrations throughout this module, so I thought it would be great to just give you an overview for anybody who's not familiar with what VE Pro is for. VE Pro goes back to an era where you really couldn't run a lot of instruments on the same computer as your DAW or your notation software. That's changed, but it's still really functional even when you're running it on the same computer. So in the old days, you might have a rack of servers that are running all your instruments, and then they would connect to your main computer, which would just be running your DAW or notation software. Those servers would do all the hard work of the sample manipulation triggering the samples, and believe it or not, it would more or less playback in real time, even though they were on different computers traveling over a network. And then your computer, your main workstation would be relieved of all that burden, CPU wise, memory wise, right? You could have a server that maybe didn't have the fastest processor, but had a ton of RAM for loading all of these samples in it. That's where VIPro started to try and solve that problem of how can we use magnificent sample libraries that take up, you know, gigs and gigs of storage? As professional composers and kind of just be able to work with it in a fluid way. Nowadays, you can actually run VIPro quite confidently on the same computer. And in this case, I run Darko and Cubase and VEPro with the Full Berlin series on a Mac laptop, and it runs really, really well. So horsepower and CPU and RAM have come a long, long way. VE Pro is a way of abstracting the instruments out of Dorico. So it's a way of having them set up somewhere running. They're all configured. You can save sort of what I think it calls a project server or server project, which represents a series of instances, and each instance contains any number of contact or sign player instances or, you know, whatever you're using if you're using VSL Synchron, if you're using Opus from East West, that's where you would put that. You would put these in instances within Van ensemble Pro, and then you can address them either over a network if they're on another computer or with local network addresses. It's very, very simple. I took me about an hour and a half one afternoon to make the switch to using VEPro. Using VEPro has a couple of big advantages, even though I no longer need them need it to abstract out the RAM and CPU strain from my main computer. Aside from that, it's always running in the background. That means I could switch from Dorico to Sebelius, to QBs to Logic, and all of those could connect. They can only connect one at a time, but they could all connect to a similar set of sample libraries. If I were to have them instantiated within each one of those pieces of software, I would have to wait for the software to shut down, clear out all the samples, load up the next software. It loads up all the samples, takes forever. With VEPro, you load it up once in the morning. It's just running there. Whatever software I want to run connects to it. I don't have I'm relieved of that wasting time waiting for samples to load and unload. So that's that's what VE Pro is. I'm going to walk you through kind of what's going on here. So you can create a new instance anytime and you can call it whatever you want. You know, I could just call this Irish. And then I could load in a bunch of Irish instruments in here. You know, that would be easy. Then I'm going to go ahead and just delete that. Then you can create any number of instance or channels. So I could say, you know, I want to add a SynchronPlayer, or maybe I want to add a plug in, and then I could add contact or massive or the sign player or anything like that. So you can just add multiple channels. And then this first little number here, these are ports, and these are mini ports, and you need to decide how many ports you want. And that brings me to the next topic. You're going to want a port for each instrument, and that goes back to this worksheet here. So I would refer back to this instrument or this worksheet and I would say, Okay, you know, I'm working on my wins over here, right? Or sorry. I've got Piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, and contrabassoon. I've got eight instruments. Therefore, I need eight ports, and that's what I would see over here in my worksheet. I need eight ports. For the winds. I need seven ports, ultimately for the brass, six for pitched percussion, only three for orchestral percussion, and then seven for strings. Now, I don't need to have eight plus seven plus six. You know, I don't have to have like 30 or 40 ports because each of these instances can run something different on port one. Wins that instance in VE Pro over here can only run one thing on port one. But over here in Bass, we've got solo horn on port one. All right? And then over here on pitched percussion, I've got Timpani on port one, so you can reuse the ports per instance. So you just need to think about what's the maximum number of ports you're going to need at once. For me, in this example, using the Berlin Free orchestra, that's eight. And then you go up into Vienna Ensemble Pros settings. Or preferences. And you can go in here and you can say, you know, instances, I want to start with each instance having 12 midi ports per instance or 16 or eight or four or whatever. You just decide there. Right below this is midi outputs, and this is also something you want to think about. Again, reusable per instance, because you'll notice that when I have the let's go to the strings, Go ahead and close the preferences. Go to strings. And let's zoom in over here. You can see that each instrument here, this violin section, viola section, solo Cello, cello section, basses, and harp, for some reason, the Berlin free orchestra puts harp under strings. I would normally think of that as being under pitched percussion, but I left it here under strings, since that's the way orchestral tools organized it. But you can see each one has a unique one, two, three, four, so on, so forth. I just iterate through them. But you can also see that they have an output stereo pair out one, two, out three, four, out, five, six, so on, so forth. You want to have a unique audio pair for each of these channels. So you can reuse these. Coming out one, two in winds is the piccolo. Coming out one, two in brass is the solo horn. When you're in the preferences over here, looking at instances. That's what you're setting here. And if you set 24, that means you're going to get 12 pairs. Okay? It doesn't mean you're going to get 24 pairs. It means you're getting 12 pairs, 12 left and right. So each output being stereo, which is typically what you're going to want, is going to require two channels, the left and the right, which is why 12 pairs is 24 audio outputs. Okay? So you think about how many ports do you need, and then how many audio outputs do you need and make sure that you set that in the preferences for Vienna Ensemble Pro if you haven't already got kind of a workflow going with Vienna Ensemble Pro. Um, and then the next step is endpoint names. Once I've created, let's say, I've got this brass instance in Vienna Ensemble Pro, let me switch back here. I've got brass, and it's got my instruments, and each instrument has a unique port and a unique audio output. Then all I need to do is instantiate a VST plugin back in Darko or my DAW or whatever software I'm using that references this. So let's look at how that works in Darko. In the play mode, I think actually I'm in wins here, so I'm going to stick with since I have the Berlin pre orchestra wins open, I'm going to go ahead and pay attention to wins, right? So we've got wins over here. I got an instance called wins, and it's got all these wind winds in it, and each one's got a unique port and a unique stereo pair, right. So back in Dorko, I'm going to go to the play mode. And then on the left hand side here, I want to have an instance I could click on the plus. I could click on this, go down to VSL, then I would click Vienna Ensemble Pro, and then I hit Connect, and I find the thing that I want to connect to, and I select it, and then I hit Connect, right? That's how you connect to these things. I don't want to do it right now because it'll break the other connection. I'm going to delete that from there. But you can see that my VEP BFO wins is actually connected to BFO wins, which is the name of my wins over here. You can even see that it inherited that orange color that I had. So what this means now is it in Darko, I need to go through each instrument, and I need to assign it appropriately to that. Once I assign each one of these tracks to that, then I go through, and you can see that the port number here is iterating. So you have port one, port two, port three, port four. You just leave the channel on one. You want to click on endpoint setup, okay, and rename this to something that you can read, something that makes sense to you. However many ports you decided you need, that's how many ports you want to have here in your endpoint setup. Generally, I'm just using one mini channel per. Even though we're going to be doing channel switching, we don't need to think about that here. Just set this number of mini channels to one, click Set, and then any extraneous rows down here will just disappear. Then you can see that the instruments are assigned correctly, and then you can also make sure you can double click here and select your expression maps. Now, we're going to be getting into expression maps in upcoming lessons, in fact, in the next lesson. So I won't get into that too much right now. But that should give you a frame of reference for how you start thinking about counting your ports, your audio outputs, renaming your endpoints, and where you're going to configure all this stuff, where you're going to assign the instrument to the VIPro instance in Darko, and how you connect that back to VIPro so it's sending Mi to the right instrument. You're also going to see here, of course, that you need to assign an expression map right here in this drop down box. So once you've got all that stuff done and your endpoint configuration looks good, you'll notice that this whole endpoint file is just my woodwinds, and this is a big part of my suggested recommended workflow is that you create section based projects in Darko only for the purpose of maintaining building and maintaining your endpoints. So this is a project that I only use when I need to change or modify what my Berlin free orchestra or BFO I'm nicknaming it wins endpoint is. This is an endpoint maintenance project file. That's what this is, okay? So now in the next lesson or two, we're going to actually get dive deep into expression maps, and you're going to see how we actually build those from scratch. So if you have questions already, post in the Q&A. Otherwise, check out the next lesson. I highly recommend make sure you have that worksheet done is going to help you a lot with the upcoming lessons. And without any further ado, let's move on. 5. Create an Expression Map for Your Section: Now we're going to start really diving in deep and building an expression map. Expression maps connect your score, what's written in the score to your sample library, so they're extremely important part of this to get right. There are two parts that we're going to start with here, and that is what articulations do we need? What techniques? And then how are dynamics handled? Okay? So that's going to be primary dynamics and then secondary dynamics. So we want to start by looking at the worksheet which we have an example of over here. And I started with these base switches we really only need these three sustained or natural, legato and staccato. And let's look at why. In our wins section, which is the example that we're looking at in this lesson. So we've got our wins section represented here in its own project, which we are just using to develop the endpoint configuration for the woodwinds. It's connected to VE Pro, and now we're building out the expression map that's assigned to each one, so we can actually see if I go ahead and close this out. And we look at the endpoint configuration, we can see that our ports are set up correctly, that we've renamed it to something readable, that we have a port for each instrument. And there's an expression map assigned, and we can double click if we wanted to assign something else. I'm actually using the same expression map for all the instruments, and this is why if we look at the actual instrument in VE Pro, we can see that all the instruments have sustain and staccato. So, right? Piccolo has them, flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, and contrabassoon. There's only two different ones, and that's the legato capability in the clarinet and the solo flute. But they all have staccato short. They all have sustains, but only the clarinet and the flute have sustained plus legato. That's true legato, which is a really nice feature in a free library. Now, if you mark something with a legato slur in Darko, and there's no playback for it. There's no sample for it. So in this case, if we did that with, let's say, the English horn, which doesn't have legato in this library, then it won't play back if everything's configured correctly. And then that reminds me I should go back and either take that slur off, or I need to work on worth a library that supports that if that legato slur is really, very important. So by having one expression map that loads on all the instruments, essentially, I will hear when an instrument doesn't play back, and I can see that that articulation is obviously not supported in that in that particular instrument, which is one of the reasons why for this example, especially, I think it's actually helpful to have the same expression map for all the woodwinds. You don't need to go through and create an expression map for the Piccolo and the oboe and the English horn and the bass clarinet and the bassoon, the contrabassoon. They are all exactly the same. You got naturals and you got cysteines. And even in richer, more mature sample libraries, it's commonly the case that many of the instruments have the same articulations. So let's go back here into the desktop and explore a little more deeply about actually writing out this expression map. So there's two ways we can edit the expression Map. Once it's assigned here in this dropdown box, we can click this button for Edit Expression Map, which brings up this window. That's one way we can access it. Another way we can access it up on the library menu and go down to Expression Maps. And that brings up exactly the same window. We just have to make sure that on the left hand side, we have our Expression Map selected. Now, we've got base switches. We do not have any add ons. We've talked about that why we're not using anti addons with this library. It's just a simple library. It doesn't need them. We've also talked about these condition based articulations, which are kind of doing some smart work for us behind the scenes, playing different articulations configured in VE Pro, depending on the length of notes. But these ones here, these are really what we're talking about because natural and staccato, those are in all the wind instruments here. Legato is only in the flute and the clarinet. So over here on the right hand side here, we are assigning a channel that chooses the base switch, the main articulation. And then the control change 70, that chooses the variation. We don't have any add ons here, so we don't really have any variations, which is why you're going to see in my example here, CC 70 always equals zero, and that's what we have documented over here in our spreadsheet, right? So we have the CC 70 value always zero. But staccato goes out, Channel three, Legato out channel two, and the regular sustains out channel one. And we see that over here. We see naturals go out channel one. We see Legato goes out Channel two, and we see staccato goes out channel three. All right. Now, if things are configured correctly, we're going to hear playback, and let's just go ahead and listen to this. I've just got a very simple melody. Had you go down there to stay in range? Okay, so all very simple. Again, this project is just designed as an endpoint manager for this one section for wins. I would do the same thing for brass. I would do the same thing for strings, pitched percussion, unpitched percussion. A family that you want to include in your playback template, I would recommend you create a project like this. You just put some simple notes in there. It doesn't have to be that you compose a piece of music. You're just trying to make sure that sound comes out and you're getting what you expect. If you had legato, if you had more advanced library with marcados and portados and tenutos, then by all means, mark those up and test them out, make sure that they sound right to your ear. Okay? But there's one more thing besides just articulations, and that is dynamics. So let's go into here again, open up our sheet here. And look at dynamics. So you don't see anything over here until you choose one of the base switches. And then you get volume dynamic and secondary dynamics. So pretty much there's always one primary dynamic setup. It's typically set to note velocity by default. But for most libraries, I choose, I would recommend control change one, which is modulation, CC one, and then CC 11, which is expression for secondary. Um, what that's going to do this configuration right here means that in legato, I think I have the same thing set up for natural. In staccato, I'm using note velocity. But what this means is that CC one and CC 11 are going to be sent to the instrument to represent the dynamic markings. If I mark something with a hairpin or piano meso forte, then that information is going to be sent. That dynamic information is going to be sent on two CCs. CCO, typically in a good library is going to change between velocity layers. So you're going to get actually a tamboral change because when a violin player leans on their bow and plays harder and louder, it's not just that it gets louder. You actually get a slightly different tamber, a different tone from the instrument than if the bow is moving lightly and slowly. So it's not just volume. CC 11 really is just volume. So when you move CC one and CC 11 together, that's where you get the most realistic outcome, you get the tambor change and you get the volume change. And these are responding to your dynamics. So let's look at an example of this. If I were to come in here on my flute, select these notes. Let me switch back to the desktop for you. And I were to select these notes, and I was going to hit Shift D for dynamics, pop over, and I'm going to go from piano to forte. All right, so I get this hairpin. I could actually see this down in the key editor if I wanted to. Let's drag this up a little bit. And if I were to drag this up, add an editor for dynamics. Now in dynamics, I can see the point where this hairpin is actually increasing the dynamics, right? We can actually see that, which is pretty cool. We can see the beginning point, what piano really means in terms of MidCC and what forte really means. That's not actually sending any information yet, but this dynamics curve is going to get translated into CC one and CC 11. If we want to see what that looks like, we can actually choose them down here, so we can click on CC one. CC 11 and you can actually see this gray line that represents what Darko is approximating this dynamics marking this hairpin two. And this is actually a CC curve that's going to be sent on midi CC one to the instrument or sent on CC 11 to the instrument, right? So we're going to get this in response from the instrument. So it starts out quieter and piano gets louder as forte. So that dynamic is working very well. If I were to change if notes were to Uh, velocity set, you can see that instead of changing the MIDI CC values down here, instead, it's changing the velocity values. That's what happens when you choose note velocity here instead of control change one. DACOs actually going to manipulate the velocity for you. Now, a power tip, something you really want to know, is that you can adjust these things, okay? You can adjust these on your own to whatever you want to be want them to be. But that means that the human affected change that I just did, that gets saved into the project. If I change the dynamics, it won't change it for me because I've gone in and manually changed a Darko, presumes I know what I was doing. If I wanted to reset to the dynamics that the Darko expression map thinks I should have, then I need to select the notes, and there's a command called reset playback overrides. It's right here. And you'll see now after clicking that, that the dynamics has been changed, okay? So that's just a little power tip. Now, in the next video, we're going to just refine this expression map a bit more and look at the CC assignments, the channel switching, some other things to get these expression maps to be primo super reliable and ready for prime time. That's coming up in the next lesson. 6. Fine-Tune Your Expression Map: The last lesson, we got a good start building out our expression maps, and we made sure our articulations were in there. We talked about why those are the articulations. And then we also set up our dynamics. And we've got that expression map assigned to all the instruments in our endpoint project. But there's a little bit more that we can do with expression maps to add more realism to our playback. And that includes making sure that the the different variations of articulations can be used. We're going to be using CC switching for that and also setting up and understanding how we've set up condition based switching because that really can impart a lot of realism and sort of liveliness to your score without having to go in and sort of micromanage every individual note. So let's jump in here and check out some of these things. So starting with channel switching, This is an unusual approach. I know that the traditional approach is that we would switch between articulations using key switches. That's by far, the industry standard has been for a very long time. The reason I don't use key switches is that key switches get written into your MITI as very low notes, you know, C zero, D sharp, zero, things like that. And if you move that MIDI if you're going to orchestrate it professionally or you move it into other instruments that don't recognize the key switches, like a synthesizer, for example, I'll actually interpret those as notes, obviously. They're not being interpreted as, um as key switches, but as notes. And in order to avoid the hassle of having to put them in and then remove them, I prefer key switching or sorry, channel switching. So how does channel switching work? Well, if we have this note here, which is being registered as a conditional, that's what the Tilda tells me it's detached very long. That's about right. It's a whole note, so I'd say that's very long. So we want to look up the detached very long in our expression map. For the wins. So we have our expression map selected. Come in here. We find very long right here, and we can see that this is going out on channel one, okay? And CC 70 value is one, as well. That tells us that we're triggering the very long sample. Now, back in Ve Pro, where the samples are actually getting triggered, we can see that a CC 70 value of one is just triggering sustains. Perhaps if I had a more mature richer library, the full Berlin series, the BBC symphony orchestra, something like that from Spitfire, VSL, then I would have enough articulations to actually apply different ones, each one here. In this case, with this simpler library, I'm just using sustains for very long, long and medium, and then I'm using staccatos for short and very short. But the important thing here is that this is where I set the channel, okay? So I've set the channel to one that correlates to this over here, channel switch one. Then CC 70 value one correlates to this number right here, which I can also change to any value that I want. I'm going to get this playback when this articulation is triggered. And this articulation is triggered when if I double click, I can see that it's a natural articulation and it has a length that is very long. And this is also going to have two dynamic levels, one with CC one and one with CC 11. Okay? So now I can look in my key editor. If you don't know how to open that up, you're looking at it like this. Down here at the bottom, you click on this little bar, that opens up. You can open up any number of lanes that you want. But this playing techniques lane is what we really want to use to identify how Darko is interpreting a specific note. So this note here we can see it's being applied to this switch, the detached very long. And we can see in the mouse over here, the sort of overlay that it's natural and the length is very long. Okay? So we can confirm using the playing techniques lane here in the key editor that everything's actually being triggered correctly. And hopefully now, too, you understand how the channel switching and the CC switching is actually being applied. The conditions we've talked about already, but the conditions in the way that I'm using them here is to sort of automate note lengths to play different samples. And you can mess around with that. You don't have to just use sustains and staccato. One of the reasons that I set it up here so that the switching is actually happening in V P here is because I could assign CC value two on Channel one to anything. You know, if I had a very complicated library, I could apply that to portado or Mercado or mate or any number of different articulations that I wanted to have happen when a note is very long or long, you know, so maybe very long I would want it to be um espressibo and maybe long, I want it to be sustained, medium, I want it to be tenuto or portado or something like that, right? So you can choose the samples, load them into the correct CC, and then you just know that whatever is very long is always getting triggered to a unique sample, and then your score is more readable and you get really interesting more nuanced, human like playback. Okay? So, that's it. At this point, we've got our Expression map pretty much done. All we want to do is come back up to, if once we got dark loaded, I tend to go to Expression Maps. Choose the Expression map on the left, and then I click Export Library down here, and I would export that just as a backup, just to save it. I'm sorry, let me switch to the desktop. So when you're in the Expression Map window, make sure that you have it selected on the left, and then click on Export Library down here. And by doing that, you know, I just hedge my bets. I know that I have this lying in wait. For some reason, it's missing in a future project or I need to import it into an old project that predates my work, something like that. Okay? So at this point, our expression map is done. We've got it assigned correctly in our endpoint configuration. And really, the next step is to look at percussion maps. Percussion maps are very different the way they're set up, but also very similar in that they are the main sort of manager between what's in your score and what gets triggered from your sample library. So in the next lesson, we're going to set up a percussion map so you can see how that's done. 7. Construct a Basic Orchestral Percussion Map: Look at creating a percussion map. So a percussion map is very similar to an expression map. It's going to take the notation in your score and translate it to sample playback. But it's a little different because um it tends to be the case that there are different pitches in pitched instruments like a violin, not different pitches on, say, a snare or a bass drum. We do have pitched percussion like a timpani. In which case, that gets set up much more just like a violin, in which case, you have an expression map that sends the articulation, whether it's a natural articulation for a general hit or maybe a tremolo articulation for a roll to the sample library. But in the case of unpitched percussion, things like bass drum, snare, cymbol they're set up a little differently, so I want to take a minute to talk to you about how that's done and show you a demo with the Berlin Free orchestra setting up a bass drum, a snare, and a suspended symbol. These being three of the most common instruments that you would use in an orchestral arrangement. So the first thing you want to know is the instrument name, of course, bass drum, snare symbol. The playback technique is generally going to be natural for a beginner library like this. There's not a whole lot of articulations, but sometimes there will be different mallets that you could use. Sometimes they'll be hard and soft. Sometimes there'll be tremolos, sometimes they'll be dynamic, flourishes, swells, things like that. So different playback techniques can be set up, and I'm going to show you how that's done. And then I want to go over at the end just how this is all configured in VE Pro so that the right thing is being triggered. So let's dive in here to this project. Again, this is an endpoint project. It's not music it's just here for the purpose of configuring our endpoint for percussion. And let's look at what we have set up. So we have one VE proro instance, and it's connected to the BFO percussion, and that looks like this, right? It's this instance right here. And it has this is actually a duplicate, so let me go ahead and just delete that. So we have bass drum, snare and symbol, and they all have their own ports, and they also all have their own audio outputs. So that's important. It's also important that they receive midi on all channels. That's true for the winds and brass, too. You want to make sure they're always set to receive midi on all channels. That's essential part of the channel switching approach. Okay, so when we load up the bass drum, we're really loading up this drums single hits. And this actually has snares and bass drums and bongos and other kinds of drums in it. When we load up the snare, we're loading up a duplicate of that. That does not cost us more am I sign player, if you load up multiple instances or multiple versions of the same library group, which is what they call this, they'll be fine. They'll load up fine. Okay? So in symbols here, we have also single hits, but this time from unpitched metals. So these are all different unpitched metals down here. Okay? So that's how that's set up. We do want to be cognizant of our port numbers one, two, and three. So bass drum on one, snare, symbol on three. And then when we're setting up over here, we want to go to the track inspector, and we want to make sure that, of course, they all are pointing to the same instrument. Alright. Like so. So we have suspended symbol receiving on port three, snare on port two, bass drum on port one like that. Again, they all go to the same channel. But in this case, we've got two things. We've got an expression map and a percussion map. So what's that all about? Well, the expression map is really here just for dynamics. How do we manage dynamics? So we only have one articulation that's natural because in this basic library, a hit is natural. Those are sort of synonymous, and there's really only one articulation. And so the dynamics are always going to be primarily handled by note velocity, but secondarily by CC 11. That's how I prefer to set them up. This is set up as an expression map called default. All right. And we can see in our endpoint configuration that I've set up three ports with one channel each. The instruments are assigned correctly. The expression map is always default. That just basically defines the dynamics, and then the percussion map. So how does this percussion map work? How does the percussion map trigger bass drum or snare or symbol? Let's check that out. So here we are looking at our percussion map, and it looks a little different. So I'm going to click Show A. Right now, it's just showing mini notes that are in use, so we can see that C two is our bass drum, C three is our snare drum, and A three is our suspended symbol. And they're all playback techniques of natural, which as I said earlier, is basically, like a hit, okay? So we need to know what that note ename is and then what the instrument is. Now, if I want to map something to say another key, I just click Show All, and then you can see all the keys, and you can see where I have ones assigned. But if there was another one that I wanted to assign, I would just choose that. I would go ahead and I would select the instrument. Let's say, this was a Kabasa saves it right there. Let's go ahead and just type abasa. And then technique, we would generally go for natural like that, which would just be a hit. And then when you're done with that, you actually have to hit this apply button. So let's just go through that Kabasa and natural. And then I actually have to hit Apply and it saves it to that note. So what that means now is that if I load up a cabosa and I add a hit in the notation, which is just a natural articulation, it's going to trigger D sharp three on whatever is loaded up in the instrument on that port. So that's how the percussion maps work. It's a little bit different from the way expression maps work because the dynamics are not unified. They're different. The dynamics are in an expression map, and the triggered sample is in the percussion map. But we are getting the result that we want. So we have a bass drum, s and symbol. And this bass drum here and the snare and the symbol are all added using I'm not sure why this is, but it's the Y key. So in normal note input, when you are inputting notes on a pitched staff, like for a flute, you could use a key on your keyboard to input an A or a G key to input a G. Here, since it's not pitched like that, we use the Y key, and then it adds that in, and you can use the other hot keys to change the note duration if you want. So a Y is like a natural hit. It's that gets us a snare, and this will get us a kick. Sorry, a bass drum. Okay. So just be aware that when you're inputting the notes, you use the Y key instead. So that's how you set up a percussion map. At this point, we've talked about percussion maps, expression maps, endpoints. We've seen some examples of how we use endpoint projects to manage our endpoints, and we're really rapidly approaching the point where we can actually assemble and build out our full playback template. So I'm going to move forward into the next lesson and see you there. 8. Verify and Polish Your Endpoint Setup: We're almost to the point where we're ready to assemble our playback template. Of course, that's really just going to mean putting endpoints together. But our playback templates are only going to be as reliable as our endpoints. So we want to confirm that the endpoints in their individual endpoint projects playback properly. We want to make sure the naming is right on the playback endpoints so that it's clear to us what they do, what families, usually instrument families they represent. We're going to actually save them. And then we also want to look at decoupling. If you are using VE Pro, I'm going to show you how to do that. That's to make sure that when uh you shut down Dorco. It doesn't close the instruments in VE Pro, and vice versa, you want to decouple them so that whatever you load into VEPro you can always connect to it from Darko, but opening and closing Darco doesn't have any impact on it. That's kind of an important part of the workflow. So let's take a look at our little programs here. So we've got our endpoint project for percussion. In fact, we know that it all works. So we check the naming. So I'd come over here. It's named something pretty sensible. VEP, BFO percussion. Everything looks good, then I save the endpoint configuration like that, BFO percussion. Okay? Then I'm going to close this up. We'll save it, of course. And then I am going to load up the woodwinds. Wait for that to load up here. I'm going to go in here, make sure that the Instance has a common sense name. Everything looks good. Let's play it back, right? We've done this before, so we play it back. We want to make sure that everything is playing back as we're expecting it to play back. Sounds good. This is just an investment in the long term to make sure that template, your playback template works really well, right? So plays back fine. We're happy with the naming convention. We're going to open up the dialogue here and click Save Endpoint Configuration. Alright, go ahead and hit Okay. We're going to close that then we're gonna open up brass or strings. Let's go to strings next. So we've got the harp, the violin, the viola, the violincelllo, right? We've got a nice name over here. We've got our expression map assigned. Everything's looking good. We want to listen through, make sure that it sounds good. So then we go to our play, open up the endpoint configuration, save our endpoint configuration like so. Okay. Close this up, and then we just have brass. And then check that everything plays back. So we've got all our instruments here, tuba, trombone, trumpet, so on and so forth. We look back. We haven't talked a lot about brass, but here we are, is what it looks like. We've got our port settings and our channel audio output settings, and everything's set up correctly in there. Alright, so then we're going to go to the play mode, open up the endpoint configuration, click Save Endpoint as brass. So at this point, we've got brass strings, percussion, and wins. Okay. So now we're ready to create our playback template. The last thing I want to show you in this lesson is this idea of decoupling. Now, when you have an instrument loaded in Vienna Ensemble Pro, there's the option to decouple it, and that looks like this right here. This little icon up here, when your mouseover says, decouple plug in from instance, use only on preserved instances. What this does is it enables you to decide whether or not that instance should load into Vienna Ensemble Pro if it's not there, or if it should, expected to be connected and only connect if it exists there, right. So what this really does is, if it's decoupled, then you can load up all your instruments in Vienna ensemble Pro, and then you could switch from Darko to logic to cube base to Sibelius, and everything would just stay there in VE Pro. Whereas if it's not decoupled, then when you close Darko, it's going to close those instances in VE Pro. And then when you reopen them in base or logic, it's going to have to boot up and load them all against time consuming. So set that decoupling. You don't want you don't want it to be loading every time. That's fighting against the advantage of using VEPro. So at this point, we've got our endpoints saved, right? We went through each family. We have an endpoint project. We've managed our expression maps and percussion maps correctly. We have our worksheet that showed us what the base switches were, add ons. We've figured out our condition based articulations, all that stuff. We're ready to put together our playback template, and that's going to be in the next lesson. 9. Put Together Your Playback Template: After all our work, we're ready to assemble our playback template. This is very easy. You basically create a new playback template, name it whatever you want, add all your endpoints into it, and you're done. Now, because the endpoint contains your percussion maps and your instruments and your expression maps, and since your expression maps were designed using the worksheet that we started out this module with, they're going to be robust, they're going to be reliable, they're going to make sense, and they're not going to do weird things that are unexpected. Okay, so all through this process, although building the playback template ultimately is just a matter of putting a few endpoints together, it's the quality of everything that went into those endpoints that really matters. Don't skimp on that. This will make your life a lot easier. It's worth spending a day, a week getting this right so that forever more, you have a playback template that sounds great, sounds reliable, and you get the sounds out of it, you're expecting. Okay? So let's jump in here and see how we do this. So it doesn't really matter what project you have open. You're just going to come up to the play menu and you come down to playback template. And these ones that have this sort of little icon next to it, these are all factory. I don't think they are deletable. But I have some here that I've created, but we're going to create a new one. If you wanted to create one that was maybe a copy of something, you could select it and then duplicate it and you could maybe add onto it, right? So if you wanted to create a playback template that was this iconica sketch, plus everything we've done for Berlin free orchestra, then you could duplicate it and add it in there. But I'm just going to start with a fresh one here, opens this up, and I'm going to call this BFO Orchestra. Like that. You can see that it filled in a little ID name for me. You can leave that locked. You could unlock that and type in a description if you wanted to. You don't have to. And then down here, I'm going to add. Let's just zoom out a little bit, so we can see what we're adding in here. So we can see now the BFO items here, BFO brass, percussion strings, and wins. So I'm just going to add those, add each one. Percussion. You can see them filling up up here. I'm going to go ahead and just remove that. So we got brass, we've got percussion. We've got strings, and we've got wins. And if you want to know what's in each of these, of course, you can click on this endpoint configurations button and you can click over here and you can say, Well, what's in Bass? And you can see, Oh, well, there's a single player horn, trombone, tuba, horn ensemble, trumpet, trumpet ensemble, and so on and so forth. You can actually see what's in there. So that's really, really nice if you want to come back to this later on and kind of troubleshoot. Now, sometimes what you want to do is add an automatic, and this is going to be a catch all in case there's nothing covered in here. Like, let's say in here, we didn't have, you know, bongos. Well, you could go ahead and add automatic and choose whatever you know, maybe this one here, that would be on auto, and that means anything that's not defined in these would be caught by this. That way you can protect yourself against having dead instruments where there's a staff that makes no noise. All right. But I'm not going to do that for now. I'm just going to take that out, and I've named it. I've added my endpoints. And you can use family overrides and instrument overrides here. I'm not going to get into this because I don't think it's essential, but it's a convenience tool if you wanted to make sure that you if, let's say you loaded endpoints that had multiple solo violins, then you could use family overrides and instrument overrides to choose and say, well, you know, I always want the violin from this endpoint, but I want the Cello from this endpoint. You can do that. My approach of having my endpoints configured in individual projects by instrument family means that I generally don't have that problem. I'm just going to hit Okay, and there we are. We have BFO orchestra. So now, if we go ahead and we were to start a new project, so we're just going to start Oops. Let's go and start a new orchestral project with a classical orchestra. Okay, and it's got lots of instruments. And then I were to come up here to the play menu and playback template, just to prove the point, let me show you what's loaded up right now. Right now, it's loading up a bunch of Halien instruments to populate these different things, right? So we've got a Halien player, and if we load it up and we look at it, it's got flutes and Obo. So we've got all this This is what it does by default, right? But when we choose our new playback template that we just created, BFO orchestra, and I hit Apply and close. We're going to see this halon disappears and we get our BFO winds, brass, strings, and so on, so forth, everything that we need. And the instruments all get connected up over here, right? So the flutes connected to the right port. It has the right expression map, Obos on port three, clarinets on port five, you know, trumpets. There's no timpani in this playback template, which is why Tempanys coming up empty. But there is violin. There's violin two, viola Cello, we can see that all loaded up correctly. And if you wanted to, you could then save this as a project template as well, and then you kind of have a project template that you can start off new projects with that also use your playback template. But at any time, you can just choose that playback template, even on a project that you wrote six months ago. You can load it up, load up your BFO orchestra and hear how it sounds. The instruments that are played back by the playback template are completely separate from the notation and MI in your project, which is really nice because ultimately, you can create multiple playback templates. Maybe one for Spitfire, maybe one for VSL, one for orchestral tools, maybe one for your free sketch library and one for your high end production library. And then you can just switch between them when you need. It's completely separated and abstracted away from the notes that you're writing in the project, your flows, all the rest of that. So the creative the creative part is in one domain. The sounds you're getting out of it are in another, and you can kind of mix and match. However you want. Okay. So that's it for the instruction on this module. And the next lesson, I'm going to wrap it up and give you a little bit of guidance on a project that you should complete in order to really take ownership of everything that we've talked about. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Complete Your Project: Now that we've covered all of the skills and techniques and features within Dorco that you need to understand in order to build your own playback template, the next step is for you to actually build your own. So if you've walked through building the Berlin Free orchestra template with me through these lessons, then that'll give you a great head start. But I would recommend giving this a shot on your own with a different library that you want to use or just rebuild the Berlin Free orchestra from scratch. The main goal being get familiar with filling out that worksheet, first of all, then building out your endpoint projects. You're looking at just sections of your orchestra or instrument groups that you're going to be using a lot. Build out those endpoint projects. Follow the steps of applying what's in the worksheet about channel switching, ME CC values, identifying the different condition based articulations and then also base switches versus add ons that you're going to want to use. Percolate on that stuff, plan it out, and then execute it well in endpoint projects. Then spend time really going over your expression maps and percussion maps if needed to make sure that they're cohesive, that they follow your switching plan, and that they're reliably working, right? Make sure you go into your endpoint projects and play through some material just to make sure that they work and they sound exactly the way that you want. Then export the endpoints and build assemble your playback template. This process of starting with a plan, going through your switching structure, through the endpoints, expression mass, percussion maps, and so on and so forth to build a playback template is something you really want to have a lot of confidence with because even once you've built it, and I know that it's generally going to be sort of a set it and forget it thing, this deepens your understanding of how DACA works, whether it's dynamics, playing techniques, playback techniques, whether it's understanding what's in your score and how it gets to the um, sample library, what to look for in a sample library, what you need, what your capabilities that sample library need to be in order to get what you want out of it in Darko. All of those sorts of questions that composers continually face can be answered if you understand all of these steps. So this is a far reaching challenge. I'd say that it should ultimately take you only about 20, 30 minutes with a moderate library, maybe an hour for a more extensive library. If it takes a lot longer than that, it's probably a good idea to just do it a few times and work through it until these concepts become a little bit more familiar with you. If you have any questions, of course, always reach out to me through the Q&A. I do check that often, and I will get back to you and support you. If there's something that you need demo, sometimes I do make additional videos if it's something that enough students ask for. So don't be shy about asking, and I wish you good luck and thank you so much for getting through these lessons with me.