Hi Daniel,
If I’m not misunderstanding, in that (beautiful and generous) interview, Alan Silvestri describes a process where he makes an early mockup in Cubase, with tens of individual-instrument tracks. Then, he prepares a blank sketch in Dorico, to write on paper with the hit-points shown. Then he transcribes this 5-staves sketch into an 8-staves sketch in Dorico, and gives it to his orchestrator, that will use the conformed Cubase multitrack mockup as a guide.
In this process, I don’t see ensemble patches coming into play, since most of the sketching work seems to be made at the piano. In case this process had to be done in Dorico, what I find missing is a way to drive patches like “Full Strings Ensemble”, “All Brass Ensemble”, “Woodwind Ensemble”. That is, the grand staff instruments encompassing all the individual solo instruments in a single patch.
To give an example of ensemble instruments that can be used in this process: Albion One has the orchestra divided into Strings, High Woodwinds, Low Woodwinds, High Brass, Middle Brass, Low Brass. Which instrument to recall, in Dorico, to host them?
More complicate: VSL’s has instruments like BBO Black Eye, were the full orchestra can play techniques that need a dedicated set of playback techniques. A standard ensemble instrument definition would not be enough, because it is a very specific set of extended techniques for an orchestral ensemble.
I’m probably missing some features that is already there, but at the moment I can’t see any other way than using a set of Keyboard instrument definitions, with manually added playback techniques and expression maps. This can probably just end up as a template. I’m not sure I could use playback templates to create it, since a playback template would probably be confused by the fact that all the grand staves in the sketch are marked as Keyboard.
Paolo