Here is the promised video…
Anthony Hughes I am not, but it might get the idea across. I don’t know if I’m sticking with this, but it’s surely fun and reasonably fast!
Faster than me playing Piano at any rate…
See Dorico user Benji gettin’ all “revenge-y” when he takes on Anthony, Christian, and other tutorial video makers in this epic installment
Nicely done, @YourMusic.Pro — thanks for making and sharing that!
I’m among the Wacom Tablet ignoranti. Is there an onscreen numpad you’re tapping?
In the proud give-them-an-ounce-and-they’ll-ask-for-another-pound spirit, I’ve love to see a pic (or even a live-action video) of the Wacom side of what you’re doing.
Well, I actually have a nice, if somewhat dated, touch-enabled Windows Ultrabook, but the problem is then to quickly select rhythmic values, since there’s obviously no Numblock anywhere, since the screen folds back on that particular model.
I mapped the durations, ties etc. on the lowest octave of my big stage piano, and on the highest octave I programmed enharmonic switches, so I can play in nearly everything. Yes, it sounds funny, bit it is really faaaaast.
This is something I have been messing around with on and off for a quite a while. I don’t’ have a ton of finale experience, but I do find its speedy mode with the arrows to be very intuitive and what I like is that I can enter a lot of music without having to look down at the QWERTY keyboard…and particularly when i am away from a midi keyboard.
A long time ago I even tried to create a pseudo speedy mode when using Duraction-before-pitch in dorico, by remapping arrow keys around…and it sorta worked and was indeed faster.
However, I think in the grand scheme of things it starts to get weird and I’ve since gone back. the reason is becuase of various selection extension operations and what not. It’s difficult if you remap up and down to alt up and down, then you have to remap alt up and down to something else and shift-alt and cmd-alt and so on. It’s rabbit hole and eventually you can remap everything without conflicts but then it will feel unintuitive as you do other kinds of editing operations. I mean moving around the staves is not neccessarily something to do often, but how about selecting 4 staves while in input mode so that you can enter a melody into several staves at the same time? yes. Or dynamics entry across several staves at the same time, etc. Also, to be consistent you will want to change left and right arrows to match whatever you’re doing with the up down arrows…and then it gets really weird. The truth is in dorico if you’re using the QWERTY you need to move around from note to note, object to object, using the arrow keys and without moving the notes anywhere…in fact its a good idea that hitting arrow keys won’t accidentally move a selected note. you have to use a modifier key with it to do that…and it makes sense (except for when you’re trying to emulate speedy mode, then it doesn’t).
You want to be able to move between objects, sometimes between staves sure…but definitely move between notes left and right and shift arrow to select them as you go, and etc…
well in the end i went back to factory defaults because of the inconsistencies and because in the big picture…dorico’s mapping is really good for all that stuff…EXCEPT for the dilemma that speedy entry is not intuitive or fast that way at all. but if you change the shadow keys only…that kind of does it…ok…but still when you are in pitch-before-duration note entry mode…its still extremely useful to be able to move around with the arrow keys, entering dynamics and other things…so then sometimes it gets back to the same issue as above…having the arrow keys mapped for up and down, then forces you redo remap those other functions and it starts to get confusing again.
where I am now, I have mapped the ’ key and the / key as my up and down shadow note keys. Leaving the arrows completely factory. It’s only slightly less intuitive then the arrow keys…with the arrow keys you can float one finger over both up and down buttons…and its very fast to enter speedy mode with one finger on the up down keys. With my method I have to use two fingers…and I’m getting faster at it, probably eventually I will be just as fast as single finger on the up/down. but it leaves the arrows completely untouched for factory behavior in all those ways…and I personally think that other behavior does matter.
I also turned off the way I had my fake speedy mode with the duration-before-pitch mode and arrow keys to move the selected note up and down, kind of like speedy mode in reverse…it actually works pretty darn good and has some advantages…but… then you ahve it where as you are moving around the score you might accidentally move notes when you arrow…because stuff gets selected a lot automatically as you move around. So basically I don’t advise that option either…same as before…better to have factory settings for the arrows…and use some other keys for shadow note speedy mode emulation when you want that.
I’m a Finale refugee after 30+ years with it. I used Speedy Entry with both the QWERTY and up/down arrows. I like Dorico’s entry method except for having to hunt and peck for the correct pitch keys. I got the Stream Deck Mobile app for my iPad and set up a layout for the pitches, durations (though I tend to use the keypad for those anyway)!
Anyway… a suggestion: use your phone with the Stream Deck app. The free version gives you six keys which you can use for the shadow note up/down and four others (left/right, flat/sharp, etc).
That way you still have the standard (default) keys and Finale-style Speedy (arrow) Entry.
I’ll for sure mess around with it quite a bit. Normally in what I use Dorico for, arrangements of songs for my students and various leadsheets, I don’t have to enter oodles of notes, much is copy and paste stuff, slash regions, chord symbols and rhythmic cues.
I don’t play piano, but do own a tiny midi keyboard just for note entry, but I’m really slow. So the tablet could actually work better for me, we’ll see… I’ll keep practising.
Daniel, if you’re reading this, I’d love for the note entry area (the bar with the grid…) to have adjustable width, in order to hit the grid easier with mouse or pen, including the bar that the cursor hovers in, with the shadow note.
Very cool, thanks for sharing! Kind of makes me miss my Wacom tablet and wish I didn’t sell it
I had a really hard time as I mentioned in most audio apps, where navigation/moving/editing always seemed to be poorly supported, for example in DAWs which I had been using. Hard to explain but doing simple moving of tracks or attempting to scroll the timeline was always such a pain and sometimes very screwy. Curious if Dorico is better for you with these other tasks such as moving about? Or do you only use it for note entry?
Also does your pen have the additional mappable button on the side? I remember mine could be assigned to right-click but I could also custom assign it to key commands if I wanted. I don’t know if it would be possible to implement in Dorico but I think it could be extra cool if the pen with two buttons could be mapped to cycle through rhythmic values, so you hit the “forward” button and the rhythmic note value gets smaller, and “backward” button gets larger. Making me want to get one again, but the question in my studio is always: “where the hell do I put this thing?” I haven’t seen the surface of my desk in years