I am a Cubase 13 Score editor user and I just can not figure out how the new Dorico based Score editor in Cubase 14 & 15 works. The Cubase documentation is very sparse in my opinion and does not indicate how all the features in the Cubase 13 Score editor are accomplished. Is it possible to have a in-depth class where all of the Cubase 13 Score editor features are mapped to the functionality in Dorico (6 I assume).
Thank You
You won’t find all the features from Dorico in the Cubase 14/15 Score Editor. When it comes to comprehensive tools to make a final score, it won’t directly compare with the Cubase 13 Score Editor either.
What it is good at doing is giving you a generally nice default appearance of the score. If you’re doing simple things and aren’t necessarily too picky about how they are notated as long as they look good, you can do a final score in there. However for customization you probably want to bring it over to Dorico.
The Cubase Score Editor has its own documentation separate from the main Cubase program documentation - so make sure you’re looking in the correct documentation.
Thanks for the information. I guess I will use Cubase 13 untill Steinberg includes more functionality into Cubase 15 and beyond.
That doesn’t make too much sense to me, as the Cubase Score Editor is never going to have all the features that the Cubase 13 and earlier ones did, they already said so. The current Cubase Score Editor in Cubase 15 is around the same level of functionality as lite versions of Dorico, but with note entry and other such things being less efficient at the moment due to not having the powerful shortcut keys and popovers from Dorico.
See this blog article for details: Introducing the new Dorico-powered Score Editor in Cubase 14 – Dorico
As it says there:
“It is therefore no longer necessary for Cubase’s Score Editor to be weighed down with functionality that is better handled in dedicated music notation software. It can be more focused: to produce clean, legible notation by default; to allow you to read, edit and create MIDI data in music notation as similarly as possible as Cubase’s other MIDI editors; and to allow you to create simple performing materials for live musicians quickly and easily.”
Continuing to use the Cubase 13 score editor is just going to give you even more scores that are stuck in that version. Trying to open anything from Cubase 13 or older with a score is not going to display it properly and might potentially remove the score data that is there if saved in a newer version. I’m not sure that there’s ever going to be conversion for old Cubase 13 and prior scores, so I wouldn’t recommend creating even more such scores that you can then not open without keeping Cubase 13 around.
At least if you make them in Cubase 15, if you need to do more advanced things with them, you can export them to Dorico as a Dorico project file, and it will look completely identical in Dorico to how it did in Cubase. With Cubase 13 that is much harder as you then have to use MusicXML to get it to Dorico if you want, and MusicXML is not a perfect conversion so there will be things broken.
Thanks for your thoughtful answer.