I noticed Sonatina has been taken down from it’s old primary hosting site. I think I still have it around here somewhere. It’s nothing special I assure you. It was basically a random collection of samples someone had collected and got permission to distribute. If I recall correctly, it came in sfz format, which meant using sforzando, Aria, or Cakewalk/Dimension. There was very little if any dynamic/pitch shaping done in the opcodes…all it did was trigger the sample (one shot at that, no loop points or anything), and let it play until you released the key. Some people would also just take the raw samples and either put them in their sample engine of choice, or lay them out directly on audio tracks.
I do believe it is possible to get very high quality, super detailed mock-ups in Dorico. It just seems like it’s going to be much more difficult at this time in terms of painstaking manual labor either with maps and vst programming, or working lanes in the play tab. Doubling instruments, using overlays, setting up delay effects, finding the right spaces in the mix to tuck the right thing, a touch of compression here and there side-chained to the right triggers, etc. The bells and whistles of the DAW offer so much in these areas, as well as tools to speed along the process of making use of them. Even more can be done if one renders the performance to audio wave forms and starts touching minor details in those tracks.
Even with my ‘really rough’ template attempting to improve Dorico’s out of the box interpretation of the score with HSO demonstrated earlier, the right mix and effects applied in the native Dorico mixer can make a profound difference. Something as simple as a parabolic EQ and a multi-band compressor in the main fader can really help bring it ‘out of the barrel’ so to speak. The right touches of reverb on each individual stave can help take the edge of the samples when desired as well (can be done in HALion itself, or via mixer inserts). That’s mixing tasks alone.
That’s before I even go in and touch things up…like the bad sfz attacks at the end (The dynamic curve I set up in HALion is very abrupt…overdid it to hear the extremes of what I was trying to do, getting familiar with what the HALion engine and samples can and cannot do). Just bringing up the level of the martelli like key-switch might help. I haven’t built a con sordino for it yet either (I think all the strings are supposed to be muted at the end as well). Missing articulation marks that I apparently did not finish inputting. Coming up with something better for the brief marcato passage, etc.
Bottom line…for $599, even though it’s touted as a pro line product…kind of like an empty and dumb DAW would be, I still think Dorico should sound better at default settings, out of the box. While the competition’s products may ultimately less capable at efficiently doing superb mock-ups than Dorico, they do give a better impression on sound quality out of the box at this time. They’re pretty warm and fuzzy sounding, and comfortable to the ears as composition/arranging workstation.
In my opinion, there are actually quite a few instruments in Sonic 3 and H6 that are easier to get a good sound, and just using the general midi expression maps at that! Here’s an old rendering I did way back when H6 first came out, using the newer Symphonic Strings content (nothing special about it, it’s mostly to serve as an unlocked example to study how macros are built), just as an experiment. It’s using the general expression map alone (Just velocity based dynamics).
So…at this point I’m going to lay off the thread for a while. I apologize if I’ve sort of hijacked it at this point. Time for me to lay low and others make points on the topic.