Transcripts
1. Introduction: So much for checking
out my course. My name is Will, and I have got years of experience
working in the studio as a producer and also as a film composer and
media composer. I use Darko primarily to sketch out my ideas
and to orchestrate the layers and
different sounds and tambers and tone colors
in my productions, and one of the core elements
of getting that realism from orchestral libraries or getting the dynamic creative sounds that I want in my
expressive music is mastering expression
maps in Darko. Expression maps are the link between what your
library is capable of and what you see
and can write into your Darko score so that
you get the creative, expressive, realistic
sound that you know you're looking for that you want to get once you bounce
out that audio. And in this module,
what you're going to learn is how
expression maps work what the difference
between playing and playback techniques are, how you can make your
expression maps reliable, the difference between
base switches and add ons, as well as a number of other terms and concepts
that make Working and Darko much more realistic
and much more expressive, much more creative, and, frankly, just a lot more fun. When you're in control of these high end sample libraries
that are available today, you can really get
amazing sounds, and that's what working with expression maps are all about. So thank you so much for
checking out my course. I look forward to seeing you
in the upcoming lessons.
2. What is an Expression Map?: Let's talk a little
bit about what an expression map really is. So there are lots of
different software programs that have expression maps, but essentially
an expression map usually connects a
piece of software with an actual sound
library and controls the manner in which
different sounds or different samples
are triggered. So in our context here,
working with Darko, we're going to be using
the expression map to make sure that something that's notated in our score, let's say, a staccato mark, then triggers the appropriate staccato
sample in our sample library. So it's really as
simple as that. We have playback techniques and things that we've
written into our score. This could also be dynamics
and things like that. And the expression map
defines how the software conveys that to the
sample instrument in order to get the
right sample playback. Now, dynamics is an
important part of this. It's handled typically
with midi CC messages, and we are going to get
into that in this module. So, in essence, it's a very simple idea that
we're dealing with. It's how do we get
the software to recognize what we want out of it when we mark a specific note
with a specific notation. And I'm going to take you
through all the steps that help us understand what
those connections are. There are a few different terms, kind of terminology you're
going to want to learn, things like playback techniques
and playing techniques, expression maps,
things like that. Alright? At the end of the day, this is essential for realism. If you really want to get a realistic outcome from the audio being produced
from your notation in Darko, you're going to need
an expression map. Some libraries do actually provide pre made
expression maps, but it's more often
the case that we have to design our own or
at the very least, make some tweaks and modifications
to the ones that were given in order to get the
most realistic outcome. Now, even after writing in our notation, this is staccato. That's legado, so on, so forth. It's typically the case
that we're going to get an even more realistic
example if we play in some CC automation or if we go in and tweak things with the draw tool or the mouse, things like that, to
get even more realism. But we're going to cover all of those topics in
upcoming lessons. So let's move forward
into the next lesson now.
3. Playing vs Playback Techniques: Now the next thing we want
to understand clearly is playing techniques
versus playback techniques. Playback techniques are in the background of the software. It's how the software
triggers actual sounds, and we don't really have a lot of interaction with
that as users. Playing techniques
are the things that we actually see
visually in our score. And when we set up a
new playing technique, basically we correlate it
to a playback technique. Playback techniques
are configurable in our expression maps. In other words, we can't
add an articulation to an expression map unless it exists as a playback technique. If it exists as a
playing technique and a playback but not as
a playback technique, then we're able to put it
in our score and see it, but it would never
trigger anything, okay? So it's very important
to understand there's such close terms playing technique and
playback technique. It's important to
understand what they do. Playback techniques trigger
the background sample. Playing techniques are more about what we see in the score. So where do we find these? Before I point that out, I do I want to explain
that some of the very basic
articulations like staccato are so common that they're actually handled
sort of automatically. They're not configured in
exactly the same way as maybe more esoteric
articulations or articulations that are maybe a little less common things
like harmonics, for example. So, you won't actually
find staccato playing techniques in the
playing techniques library. I'll show you that, but
that's because it's just handled behind
the scenes anyway. But let's take a look at
where we might set this. First of all, let's notice
that in my instrument, the staccato staccato sample, rather, in the sampler is triggered with A
sharp minus one. That's also the same as
B flat minus one, okay? Now, if we go up to our
library menu in Darko, and we come down to
play back techniques, we'll find that
here under links, we have a playback
technique staccato. So even though the
playing technique of staccato is actually so common that it's not really configured in
these dialog windows, the staccato playback
technique has to exist in order for it to
work with expression maps. Okay? So in our expression
map for the instrument here, Darko has selected
this HSO violins. If we open that up,
we can see these are all the playback techniques and they're related
key switches. And you can see this has
already been configured. Okay? When the time
we get to staccato, the key switch it is triggering
is a B flat minus one, or that's the same as
A sharp minus one, which is what we saw in our
Halien instrument, right? So as long as this playback technique
is in the expression map, and it has the
appropriate key switch. And then as long as
this expression map is registered for
the instrument, over here in the
inspector right here. As long as it's chosen, then this instrument
will respond to things like articulating
a staccato note. So without the staccato
note, we have this. With the staccato note, we get a staccato playback. Now, for articulations that are not as fundamental
and basic as staccato, they won't be handled
automatically by Darko. Staccato just happens to be
one of a very small number of articulations that
because they're universal to all instruments, because they're so common, they're not actually configured
in playing techniques. But if we go up to the library
menu and we go down to playing techniques this time,
what we'll see is this. And although we
will not be able to find staccato in here
because it's so common, it's just handled automatically. What we do find is that under each one of
these playing techniques, there's a playback technique that is correlated to it, right? So if we go to
something, let's say, if we go to strings and
we looked up spicado, Spiccato is quite common, but it's certainly only a violin or string instrument
articulation. You wouldn't have
spicado in horns. So it is configured here, and there's a playback
technique called spicado and you can change that to any
technique that you want. But this is where the thing
that's written into the score correlates to an actual
playback technique and triggers the right sound. So hopefully that explains
exactly what the difference between playing techniques
and playback techniques are, and we're going to move
forward into the next lesson.
4. Prepare Your Sample Library: Now that you understand what playback techniques and playing techniques are and
you understand essentially what an
expression map does, it's time to start planning creating your first
Expression Map. And where I suggest you start is just a
simple spreadsheet, a simple chart or a worksheet. I'm going to share an
example that is very simple. You can do this on
your own, but I've nonetheless shared
a version as a PDF, so you can just
print it along with this lesson if you want to
get kind of a quick start. But all it's really doing
is just organizing what the different key switch
values are and what the articulations are that
you're going to want to use. So let's flip in here
and just check this out. So here's my spreadsheet. It's extremely simple playing
techniques over here. And actually, what I might do
is change these to playback techniques because that's a
more appropriate terminology, since we're talking
about what happens behind the scenes, okay? And then I got
these key switches from the actual
instrument over here. So you can see, with
the instrument loaded, I looked up Legato is F zero, so that's why gatos
F zero over here. Staccato down here is A
sharp or B flat minus one, which is what we've
got down here. Pitzcado is C sharp zero. These are usually determined
by the instrument. These are not things you can
figure in the instrument. Usually the instrument
tells you what these are. Sometimes you can configure
them your and there is no natural as part of this, so I'm just going to
go ahead and duplicate Legato for both natural
notes and legato notes. So I wind up with a
spreadsheet or sort of checklist that looks like
that. It's very simple. You just want to take a moment
to look at your library, figure out which articulations you're going to use in
your expression map, and then write down, jot down what those
key switches are. So you're really organized. You're ready for the next step, which is to actually use
the expression map editor, and that's what we're going
to do in the next lesson.
5. Build a Map from Scratch: Now that you have a spreadsheet containing your
different articulations, your playback techniques that
you want to be using and their correlating trigger
notes, the key switch notes. What we want to do
next is we want to actually use the editor to create your new expression map and then assign it
to the instrument. And I want to talk about some
of the different parts of the editor so that you understand
what you're looking at. So if we are back in Darko here, I'm going to go up
to the library menu and go down to Expression Maps. This is the editor. And I've already created a new expression map
called My violin, and it contains the switches that we created
in our worksheet. So if we go ahead and
look back at this, we can see that we have legato, natural pizcato and staccato
and within each one, we have a key switch added. We're using this ad key
switch button there. For each of these, we have the key
switch set correctly inside that playback
techniques record. Okay? Now, if you wanted to change the name of
your expression map, you can do it up here. If you wanted to
control versions, there's not really any advanced
versioning control here, but you can use these version
numbers if you want to. They're not crucial to the workflow of setting
up an expression map, but just good to
know they're there. This is where you set up your
base switches and add ons. We'll talk about add
ons in a little while. But also, I want to point out this audition button down here. So what we can do with this audition button is
while we're in the editor, make sure that we're getting
the sounds that we're expecting from the key switch. So with Legato selected, I'm going to hit the
audition button. And we are getting
a sound there. It's very, very quiet,
very, very faint. So I'm going to go ahead and troubleshoot that looking
over here at the instrument. It's relatively quiet. I'm just going to bring
up the volume there so that we can hear it
a bit more clearly. So back in the expression
Maps editor here, I can select natural.
Hear how that sounds. Here Pitzcato. Here staccato. Mmm. Okay. So you can use
the audition button there to kind of give
yourself confidence that you've set up the right configurations that
it's talking to the right instrument
that you're getting the right sample playback before you're finished
with the expression Map. The one thing I want to point out at the bottom here
is mutual exclusion groups. We're not needing this to set up our first basic expression map, but these are extremely
useful when you want to create a mutually
exclusive relationship. For example, with a
string instrument, you're not going
to play Pitzcato and Spicado at the same time. It's impossible, really,
and not really appropriate, just as maybe you'd want
legato and non legato, or vibrato and non vibrato
to be mutually exclusive. In other words, if you have set a note as vibrato and the
next note as non vibrato, you don't ever want
to send both vibrato and non vibrato to
your sample library. Some of these things can
happen unintuitively behind the scenes and you wind up
getting sounds that are not what you're expecting and
get unpredictable results. Mutual exclusion groups
can help you manage that. They are set up
automatically in Darko Pro, but you are able to
configure them here. So once you have that setup, the last step is to make sure
that back in the play mode, that in the inspector
tab for the instrument that you have the expression map selected here from the list, make sure that you have the
right expression map set. So I've got the M
violin one here. Now, when we play
back these notes, we're going to hear
natural staccato pits, and then staccato again. And there we go. I'm sorry if the sound is a
little bit quiet there, you may have to just turn
it up a little bit to hear. But the sounds are
coming out correctly, and we want to deal with
dynamics in sort of a different context as far
as how loud are the notes. Okay, so that should cover how you go about
using the editor to set up your own
initial expression map configured to your
unique instrument. Let's go forward into
the next lesson.
6. Define Base and Add-On Switches: Now it's time to talk
about base switches and add on switches. And these are very helpful but also not necessarily
that intuitive. A base switch is essentially a fundamental sort of
articulation, pizzicato, staccato, legato, things like that, whereas add ons are designed
to extend a base switch. So for example, you
could have legato, but you could also
have legato harmonics. You could have a legato
consortino, something like that. So the concertino part
would be an add on, as Legato would be
the bass switch. And what I'm going to do here is show you how you
could actually switch with the HSO Halien
symphonic orchestra. You can switch
between a fast legato and a regular legato. And you'd use the regular
legato most of the time. But for very rapid passages, maybe a scale run, something like that, you'd
actually want to use the fast. So I'm going to show you
how you can set that up using play back techniques,
playing techniques, and then also add ons
combined with base switches, troubleshoot the whole thing and make sure that it's
operating correctly. So let's get right into it. Essentially, I've got
this example here. I've extended a little bit. By putting a slur
over a set of notes, that immediately tells Darko automatically that I
want legato notes. And provided that I have
a legato identified in my expression map that there's a Legato playback
technique identified, then you will see it down
here in the playback lane. Okay? So these four notes, as well as these four, it's just that these four here, as you can see, are 16th. So there's a much
more rapid line. It would make sense to use a slightly different legato
transition one that's optimized for fast
playing fast runs. Let's just listen to what these
two little passages sound like. So, very simple. But you'll notice over here
in the instrument that it's only using the legato
patch to play those back. So what we want is for it to use the legato fast on
the second patch. So what we need is
an add on switch. If we go up to our
expression maps here, and we click on this sign
has a little plug or sorry, not plug, but puzzle piece. We're going to go ahead.
If we hit, let's say, fast, there's
nothing here, right? So that means we don't have
a playback technique yet. And this speaks
to the importance that you can't actually
add anything to an expression map unless it exists in your playback
technique collection. So in order to do that, I'm
going to go to my library. I'm going to go select
playback techniques. And I'm going to go ahead
and I'm just going to add it under um let's say lengths, and I don't see a fast, so I'm just going
to add a new one. I'm going to call it fast. And I'm going to make
this direction base. That means it takes effect until it's changed
to something else. Alright. You could also set it as attribute
if you wanted to, but I'm going to use
it as direction here. Alright, so I've created
that playback technique. Now, I am unable to actually incorporate it in
our score until we set up a playing technique. Playing techniques
are the things that we see in the score. So I'm going to go
to Common here, which is where we have legato. And I'm going to create
a copy of legato. I'm going to select legato and I'm going to
hit this button, which creates a
duplicate of that. Okay. I'm going to
call this legato fast. Alright. And I'm going
to come down here to the playback
technique dropdown, and I'm looking for the
fast that I just created, and we will find it. Where is it right there? Okay, so that's
fast right there. That's what we're
going to put in our expression map is fast. And then I can
update the text here so that it's going to say fast, I suppose. Like that. It gives you a little
preview up here, and then we are
off to the races. I'm going to go ahead
and click Okay. Now we can go into
our expression map. And we can add a new
add on for fast. Okay. And under fast, I'm going to go ahead
and send a key switch, which is F sharp zero over here. F sharp zero, like that. Okay. Now, this expression
map has already been applied, but you'll notice
how now this says add on instead of base, right? I could also set this up as a base switch where I
could set up legato, and then I could also
choose fast here. Where is fast right there. And then you get
Legato and fast, and you can click Okay here. And you can set this
up Legato and fast, and you can go ahead and set a key switch for that as well, which would mean that it's
not an add on that you could use on staccato or an add on
you could use on Pitscato, but it's only looking
for legato and fast. So I'm going to go
ahead and type in F Sharp zero. Like so. Now if I come in here and I want to make sure this first
one plays regular Legato, but the second one
plays Legato fast, I can add the articulation fast. Legato, I guess Legato two is
what it got registered as. You can see that it's
typed incorrectly. If I wanted to change that
text from Legato two, then I would do that
in playing techniques, find Legato fast and find
this popover text right here, and we could change
that to fast. Alright. So now, in our
Playback laying down here, we can see that
legato is what is the articulation
that's governing the first little legato passage, while Legato plus fast is
what is governing the second. So we're going to see that
switch over here between legato and legato fast.
Let's see how that works. So you can see that the Legato fast has a nicer
transition that's a bit more well matched to
having a short run like that. So I want to point out some caveats about
what we just did. Setting up a base switch is always going to be
mutually exclusive, meaning that it's going to override all other
base switches. You can't have multiple base
switches triggered at once. So base switches are
mutually exclusive. When I set up the combo
of Legato plus fast, you can also set up
more than just two. You could say Legato plus fast plus consortina,
for example, if that was an
articulation you set up, and you can set up that
combination as a base switch, which ensures that it
is mutually exclusive. I'll never be triggered
with another articulation. That may work better as a
base switch in this case, because we only want this fast aspect to apply
to types of legato. Consortino for example, might apply to
staccato consortino, legato consortino, natural
consortino, you know, even pizzicato
consortino or whatever, you might want consortino apply to a variety of base
switches, in which case, you'd want to set
it up as an add on, and then it'll work
on a variety of different base
switches because add ons are not mutually exclusive. You can actually stack
them on top of each other. So I hope that helps you understand the
differences between base switches and
add ons gives you an example of how
they might be used, and we're going to go ahead
into the next lesson.
7. Reuse with Endpoints & Playback Templates: This point, you are pretty much aware of how to set
up expression maps, what the different features are, how to interpret the
expression map editor. But we want to talk about how we can set these up to be used again and again as you
compose piece after piece. And the most natural
way to do this is with endpoints and
playback templates, alongside having a
regular project template that you may load up that may have certain instruments
in it that you like, you generally want
to have a template for which libraries
you're going to be using, and we call that a
playback template. I'm going to show
you how to set that up and then how to save this combination of the violin we've been using so
far in this example, along with the expression
map into what's called an endpoint and then
add that endpoint to a playback template
that you can rely on using in perpetuity so that you don't actually have
to go back and configure these things again and again for every individual project. So let's go ahead and walk
through that process. The first step is,
as we've done, make sure that you
in the play mode, have an expression map setup and that it does everything
you wanted to do. So this is the expression
map that we've built. Everything looks good.
We're very happy with it. We've got it configured
with an instrument. We've tested the playback,
and it all sounds good. What we're going to do now is we're going to actually click on this CG brings up
the endpoint setup. And what I'm going to
do is I'm going to call this HSO my violin. That's a hint to remind myself which expression
map it uses. Okay? It's got this
one instrument in it. It's got one Mi port, one mini channel per port. And I'm going to click on this save endpoint
configuration. It automatically
copies the name down, and I'm going to go
ahead and just hit Okay. Now, what's happened now is that somewhere in the sort
of background of Darko, somewhere in your file system, there is a record
of this instrument, violin being paired with
this expression map and it's been turned into one unit so that next
time they're called, they're going to
load up correctly. Now we're going to go
ahead into our play menu. We're going to come down
to playback templates and you're going to see
that there's a bunch of factory templates that exist. I've also got a couple or
this one that I've created, but I'm going to create one here called let's just
call it My demo, just to keep things very simple. I'm going to click on Ad Manual, and I can see in my list HSO My violin that is a list of
endpoints that I've created. And I want to use
the endpoint HSO My Volin in this
playback template. It's that simple. I'm
going to hit Okay. And then when I go ahead
and click Apply and Close, let's just look at
what it would look like if I was not
using that currently. Let's go ahead and
choose another one. I'm going to go ahead
and use iconica sketch, hit Apply and we'll notice that the instruments are
changing over here, right? And now what we've got is a different
instrument altogether. This is the iconica
sketch playback template. So we're no longer using
the instrument that I was using before because we
changed the playback template. But if I go to my
playback template, and I choose the one that
I just made my demo, and I go ahead and
apply and close. You'll see that it's
going to change that to HSO my violin. And if you open that up,
you see, once again, it's the same instrument
that was loaded before. And under Track inspector, you can see it's got MEpression
map loaded in there. And now, if you go
ahead and play it back, we're going to get exactly
the sound we're expecting. Here's the fast, Gatto. Okay, so the idea here
is that when you are done configuring your expression map correctly and you've
matched it up to an instrument, you want that instrument to be loaded correctly from now on. Every time you load up a violin,
you want it to use this. And you can actually create
different playback templates so that you can
switch between them. Let's say that you are using three different
string libraries. Sometimes you use
string library A for your chamber music, string library B for
your trailer music, and string library C for your orchestral strict
orchestral work. You can actually have
playback templates for those, and it'll load
different violins in depending on how you've configured those
playback templates. There is one caveat, and that has to do with solo
versus section players. If we look back here
in the setup mode, we'll notice from the
single silhouette here that this violin player
is not a violin section, but rather a violin soloist. And if we go into our
playback templates, and we go ahead and
look at my demo, and we edit that and we
click on this over here, what we can tell from this
HSO endpoint configuration, if we were to click on it here, is that this pertains to
single player violins. And what that means is that if I have a section player loaded, it's not going to
necessarily apply this HSO endpoint to
a section player. It's only going to
apply it to soloist. So you may be confused if you get everything
set up for a violin, and then you have a
violin section there, and it's not loading up and
you're getting frustrated, you're wondering why
that's happening. It's because your playback
template does differentiate between endpoints that are for solo players and
section players. If you want them to
load up correctly, you have to make
sure that you've got the solo player configured. And or the section
player depending on how you want your
playback template. Set up. Okay. So that
is one small caveat. The final thing I want to talk about here in terms of keeping your template work efficient is the idea of using
endpoint projects. That's a case where
you actually create a Darko project that's simply
for managing your endpoint. So you can go ahead
and set up maybe your violin one section violin, two section viola Celi
and basses sections. In that project, it's not
really about the music. It's about making sure that
the notes trigger correctly. And you can actually
set up an endpoint that contains all of
those instruments. All right? I'll walk you through just a quick
demonstration of that, but it close out of
all these windows. Alright, so we'll
go up to setup, and let's say that
I wanted to add another soloist, Cello soloist. Alright, it's called
Voclllo here. We have it. Once again, it's a solo player. It has gone ahead and it
has loaded up Nothing. You can see that
there's nothing here. So what I'm going to
do is I'm actually going to go into
VST instruments. I'm going to add a new one. Going to select, let's say, just to keep things
very interesting. I'm going to go ahead
and open up contact. Going to open up Contact eight. It's going to load
up the window here. And from here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose the Stradivari Cello library. So that is right here. I'm going to go ahead
and load that up. Takes a minute for
that to load. Okay. Now I've got that
instrument loaded. I probably want to have these articulations
over here as well. So I'm going to leave
virtuoso and I'll go ahead and change this to I'll change
that to virtuoso, as well. Maybe this first one, I'll
change to just basic sustain. Virtuoso for legato. Over here, I'm going to want staccato, and then over here, I'm
going to have Piticato. So I've got my four set up here. We can see the key switches
now are C minus one, D minus one, E minus
one, and F minus one. So what I may do is
just add those in here. For the Cello, I
might want to make a note to myself that
this is C minus one, D minus one, E minus one, and F minus one, like so. All right. We'll just make a
note that that's the Cello. Then I'm going to close this up. I am going to open
the cog here and just rename it contact eight
isn't a very helpful name. And I'm going to call
this Stracello like so. You can see right now
there's nothing loaded, and that is because it's not actually set in
the track inspector. If I come over here and
choose Strad Cello, now when I open up the settings, I can see my Volinclllo. My solo player is already there. I can even go ahead
and just change this to one for the time being. So we just have the one
instrument in there. I do not have an
expression map set up yet. So what I'm going to do
is I'm going to click on this Expression map here
and I'm going to go ahead and create a new one called
Strad Cello I'm going to add the same articulations legato, staccato, and then pizzicato. Okay. Gonna make sure
legato is now set to D minus one like this. Gonna make sure natural is
set to C minus one, like so. I'm going to make sure
Pitzcado is set to F minus one and make sure that staccato is set to E minus one. I'm just following
my worksheet there. And this is why it's
really helpful to have that information
actually written out. Now, I have saved my expression
maps called Straclllo. I do need to come over here
to the expression map jot down and make sure that
I select it, right? Stradclllo. And now if I
go into my Stracello and I were to copy this same music down here, and I
were to play that. We can hear if I go
ahead and play them, So it's all triggering exactly the right
natural staccato, Piscato, staccato,
legato, and so on. This library does not
have a difference between fast legato
and regular legato. The final step is saving this as an endpoint project, right? So when I come over here and I want to save these
two instruments, my HSO violin and the
stracello as one endpoint, I can use this
button right here, and I could call this
my string section. Okay. Now I can add that endpoint to
my playback template. So I'm going to go to
my demo, load that up. I can actually get rid
of this because it's now included in my larger
project endpoint. Go ahead and select my
string section. Hit Okay. And now, if I apply the M demo, it's going to load up exactly
the right instruments. Again, assuming that the
violin is a solo player, and the Ccello is a solo player, and I'm going to wind up with exactly the right playback
for both instruments. Okay, so that I
hope, is very clear. And what we're going to do
next is we are going to dive into testing and
troubleshooting and some of the caveats that you might
want to be aware of there. I'll see you in the next lesson.
8. Customize Technique Symbols: I want to talk a little
bit about how you can use symbols in your score and have them trigger these
playback techniques in your sample libraries. Sometimes symbols
are appropriate, in the case of
staccato or Marcato, and other times text
is appropriate, as in the case of Pitzcato. There's also an aspect of this, which is whether or
not it's an attribute, meaning that the symbol or text applies only to the
note it's placed on, or if it's sort of duration, it continues on until
it set something else. So Pitzecato would
be an example of a duration type
playback technique, while staccato would be an
example of an attribute. But I want to show you
how we could actually set up a common articulation, which is a tone color, which is a harmonic. This is a particular
playing technique on a string instrument to get
sort of a slightly thinner, more eerie sound out
of the instrument, and we can actually
set up a symbol that represents harmonic
and then apply it to notes, and I want to show you
how we can do that. Alright, so the first
step that we're going to follow is we're just going
to listen to this example. So this is a regular
natural playback, and this is the harmonic so you can understand
what they sound like. So the harmonic is a
much thinner sound. It has a certain quality to it. How did I get this symbol? Essentially, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up to the library menu and I want
to go to playing techniques. I believe that I
created this under I created under common here. And I changed the type of the playing technique
from text to glyph, and that allows me to work
with images like this. And when you change
this to Glyph, you get a little pencil
tool right here, which is going to open
up my Glyph editor. And you have a
huge collection of different font sort
of collections, I suppose you could call them. And I had chosen string
techniques here, which gave me this
little catalog, one of which is
this harmonic icon. Select that and click Add Glyph, and that's what puts it in the middle of this screen, okay? So now I have this symbol, rather than the text, represents this new
harmonic playing technique. But in order for
that to actually trigger something in
my sound library, remember that I have to have the playback technique
exist as well. And I've got that listed here
as natural harmonic one. Okay? So let's go and check out what natural
harmonic one looks like. Natural harmonic one looks like this in the
playback techniques. I do have it set as attribute. Okay. So there you have it. Now, after having created that, it comes and shows
up down here under strings because I had added
it to the strings category, and I can go ahead and just
add it to any note you want. And you'll see that
it shows up here in the playing
techniques bar, too. So I'm going to go ahead and add that to the other whole note, and you can see now that this note is harmonic and
that note is harmonic. And if I mouse over
it, you can see that the active technique
is harmonic. And now we get that harmonic
sort of eerie sound. Okay. So now, if you do
create a playing technique, but you want it to
just be in your score, you don't necessarily want
the playback engine or maybe your playback
engine doesn't support that articulation. You just don't connect it
to a playback technique. Connect If you create a symbol, but your playback
technique is natural, then you can put it in your score visually for maybe
the player you're hiring. But it won't try and trigger it in the background
with your sounds. You can actually set up
visual only symbols, okay? We talked a little bit
about the symbol duration, whether or not it's
attribute or duration. But if you have questions
about these kinds of things, always feel free to send me a
message or post in the Q&A. All right. Let's move on
to the final lesson of this module before you take
on the project for yourself.
9. Wrap Up & Project Guidance: Now, once you've got your
expression map written, there's a variety of things
you might want to do with it. You might want to export
it maybe just as a backup, so you can put it on an
external hard drive, or you may be collaborating with another composer and
you want to send them the expression map so they can use it
with the same library. Either way, there is
an export feature that we can use inside the expression Map editor to make that backup or get
it to our collaborator. You can also import things. So if you have a
collaborator sending you an expression map or
maybe you've bought a library that provides a
set of expression maps, then you can import as well. You can also set these
up with endpoints, which we've discussed
a little earlier in order to make them
a bit more reusable so that they can be part of
a playback template that you can use in all
successive projects. That's an important
process of sort of saving, storing and really reusing
your expression maps. The final aspect is versioning, so it can be helpful sometimes to actually
create different versions. You do have to export those. But if you create, say, an expression map for
the StrataRClllo, and then there's some
sort of free update to your software and some new
articulations are added. May want to instead of
just replacing that, you may want to
create a new version. You'd export the old one,
save it in a backup, update the new one, save
that and the backup, and then you have two
versions that you can use. You do have to sort of do
that manual export and import because Darko
does not have some sort of versioning system that really helps you choose
which version to use. But it is an important part of one's workflow if one wants to be able to update and also track the
updates over time. So let's take a look at
a few of these aspects, starting with Export, once we have the expression
Map window open, you can just choose
the one you want to export from this list
on the left hand side, and you just come down
here, click Export Library, choose where you want to
save it on your computer. Likewise, we can
import a library if somebody has sent us an expression map that
we want to import. Now, if you are a Cubase user, you can import expression
maps directly from Cubase. It's just that if the playing
techniques in Darko don't exist for the techniques that are in your CASE expression
map, it won't connect up. So although you can import
Cubase expression maps, it's unfortunately not just sort of a one and done process. You have to usually be
a bit more thoughtful, and you may have to set
up some infrastructure in Darko in order for that imported expression
map from Cubase to work. But it can be a real time saver, especially if you've got large expression maps with loads and loads of expressions or
articulations in them, then you can import those from Q Base and kind of give
yourself a head start. But I want to warn
you that typically, if you're importing an
expression map from QBse, it is going to involve
a bit more setup than just that to get
it really working. You may have to set up your
own playing techniques or playback techniques inside
Darko to get it to work, okay? But that's how importing
and exporting works. We've talked about versioning, and I'll just go over that a bit more if I wanted to
create a new version of this. I may just go here, export
my current version, then I would hit
this unlock key, bump up the version
number to two, lock it, and then export this
version and just name it, Version two, so I can keep track of what the
two versions are. And then in terms of endpoints, you don't save endpoints directly from the
expression map editor, but rather once you are in the play mode and you've actually got your
instrument configured here, you can either save
an endpoint for the specific instrument
you can go to the VST MIDI tab in
play and you can save an endpoint for all the instruments that
are currently loaded. So let's say you might want
to do that in the case where you've got your
ensemble for chamber, and you've got your ensemble
for full orchestral. You've got your ensemble for trailers or hybrid cues,
that sort of thing. Then you might want to save sort of stacked grouped
endpoints for those ensembles. So you have a lot of
options for backing up, for importing, for sharing. You can sort of use
some of these features imaginatively if you want to group your different endpoints together or separate them out. You can even send endpoints to other folks to help them
facilitate their workflow, and then versioning
is another sort of creative solution that you can use the existing tools in order to manage
your workflow. So that's it for this module. I highly encourage
you to go and follow through on completing the
project for this module, which is to create your
own basic expression maps. You want to start with the
worksheet and identify the different articulations
that you want to implement, what their key switches are. Then you want to go into
the expression map editor, create a new expression map, put in the articulations. If they don't exist, make sure you add new playback techniques,
playing techniques, make sure that your
playing techniques are connected to legitimate playback techniques so that your expression map can connect up with what's in your score. Remember, playing techniques are what
you see in the score. Playback techniques are what happened behind the scenes
to trigger the sample. As you're working
on that project, if you have any questions,
please post in the Q&A. Please let me know.
Please message me. Best of luck with it. I think you know everything
that you need to know now to create your own
expression maps in Dorico and opens up
a whole new world of realism using those advanced
aspects of your library. And thank you so much for
joining me in this module.
Will Edwards, Artist. Creative Problem Solver. Musician
