Just wanted to express my appreciation to the Steinberg folks and the community here for your help and especially patience with new users. Other than using LilyPond I’m not coming from any score writing software experience (I always wrote out by hand and programmed in a DAW), but within a short month or so Dorico feels natural and second nature.
My experience so far has been a sequence of, first “Why can’t I ?/How do I ?/Why is it doing ?” which after a bit of research and help, turns into “OK that makes sense”, and with further experience turns into “Damn, that’s genius”. I’m continually amazed at how deep and well thought out Dorico is. My workflow has been hugely transformed for the better.
Amaze me features
While entering chord symbols you can play it at the keyboard and Dorico will figure out what you did and put it up. Whoah! I was just playing it to see what I did and this magic happens, didn’t see that coming.
How much insanely sensible the humanizing Dorico does to the MIDI is. I’m used to DAW’s which don’t know the first thing about what the track is, all they care about is MIDI which is a PITA. Dorico knows and uses
The music which is the intent of the playback (e.g. short, long, marks, etc).
The instrument and it’s characteristics (note range, and you can actually set MIDI ranges in the expression map)
Dorico smartly sets the defaults for me, for example default velocities. I never quite realized it before but yeah, velocity doesn’t matter much.
It sets up all the CC’s for me by automatically outputting start values. In a DAW I have to send those out
Best of all, it does this when starting from arbitrary playback points. Something I hate about DAW’s is that as you jump the playhead around as you’re working, you’ll often get some random CC being set in the sample from the previous session, leading to bad playback. With Dorico it all ‘just works’.
Ultimately the basic output of Dorico is a great starting point, and leapfrogs me to the final output by a huge amount.
Condensing - nothing need be said here about how great this is
Figured bass - I use it a lot, preferring it over chord notation
How intelligent all the dialogs are. They aren’t picky about the input, all you have to do is enter something musically sensible and Dorico will figure it out
on and on (not to even get into all the music formatting features!), I’m excited to see what else is in store for me in 3.5, and looking forward to the excitement coming with future releases
“Dorico - always one step ahead” or should it be “leap”? You’re absolutely right, a brilliant program - just imagine what it’ll be like in 10 years time!
Thanks, Dan and Rob, for your comments. We’re always very appreciative when our users take the time to tell us they’re enjoying using the software. We have much more in store!
You the Dorico team are doing an extraordinary job ! I enjoy composing on Dorico every times, always surprised by how convenient the features have been designed, especially the popover concept. And the team is so reactive to users requests and issues ! The playback is great, still can be improved, but gives already so much with the expressions map duration based : I am so much more efficient and effective at composing compared to DAW. Thank you so much !
I’d just like to add my voice to these expressions of appreciation. It’s a new experience for me to want to notate something just for the fun of it, and Dorico makes this possible. Others have remarked on this, as well, and have even made projects available on the forum. This is perhaps one of the greatest compliments to the software and to the team which created it.
I am currently writing a 6 min piece for quintet. I started next week, and I have gotten extremely far in this one week already. If all goes well, I can finish by the weekend. And all this by using a bunch of custom noteheads, lines, my own playing techniques etc etc.
And as Vaughan wrote: it is just SO MUCH FUN! Writing my compositions in a readable notation was always a task I hated with my previous software. But in Dorico, I get a tingly excitement every time I can use the harmonics feature for strings still after over a year of using it for the first time…!
I’ve noticed that! In fact Dorico is so flow inducing I think I’m finally abandoning paper for the most part and composing in the app. The biggest impact though it’s having is on getting music->DAW. I detest composing at the DAW, and hate programming it, but Dorico looks like it does 90% of it. I’m hoping I’ll just need some final tweaking of the tracks in the DAW.
Something I should have added: the fun of notating something in Dorico has not only to do with the ease of use and Dorico’s ‘intelligence’, but also with its solid programming and trustworthiness. It’s a horrible feeling to be working on a large project, the whole time worrying that a random edit will suddenly cause all the lyrics to disappear, or the formatting to change somewhere out of view, or notes to disappear, etc. I’ve never had this with Dorico.
sorry folks!