My big project doesn’t start until September, so I don’t have to commit until then. Still, I have about half a dozen other issues that are getting in my way. There are workarounds for all of them, but that is somewhat besides the point. This project (which I do every year) involves writing and orchestrating an entire musical in about 3 1/2 months. Speed and efficiency are paramount and these workarounds for common scenarios (common for me at least) are a big drag on productivity. I hope at some point the Dorico team will take a break from their pursuit of notational perfection and spend some time focusing on providing more workflow options.
I can understand your frustration, but I think your assertion that we are focused on the pursuit of notational perfection at the expense of workflow options is unjustified. All of our releases include features that are all about improving workflow and nothing at all to do with engraving minutiae. We try very hard to balance all of the competing requirements and demands of a very diverse user base. But I get it: you have an obstacle in front of you, you don’t like it, so you want to kick out a bit. We can take it.
(Ironically I think your complaint in this thread is almost entirely about notational perfection, because you don’t consider it good enough for the rests and notes in the cue to be a different size, but anyway. For what it’s worth, I certainly agree with you: I just find it odd that you choose the “notational perfection” stick to beat us with when that’s at the crux of this problem.)
The specific problem you are having in this thread concerning cues on drum parts is a tricky one. There is a big limitation in the way percussion staves work in Dorico that we need to unpick, namely that rests should be editable, and until we are able to tackle that big limitation, these kinds of workarounds will be needed.
I would be interested to know what the other half a dozen issues are: even if we don’t have good answers for them now, hearing the needs of our users is essential to help us prioritise the next things we should be working on. Thank you in advance for taking the time.
Well for me, at least, the frustration is mostly out of an eagerness to ditch Sibelius.
I did not mean it sarcastically or as snark, but perhaps “notational perfection” isn’t quite the right term. There appears to be an attempt to semantically capture every possible symbol and use case. For example “cresc.” isn’t just some italic text that hangs below the staff, it’s a concept that has multiple representations, text or hairpin. Chords are not just nicely formatted text above the staff, but global concepts that describe the prevailing harmony for all rhythm instruments. I get it. It makes sense. But sometimes we just need a free form staff without exceptions and rules and embeded semantic meaning so we can create things have not yet been anticipated.
Anyhow, lectures and gripes aside, here are the things that get in my way, in order of importance:
- Note entry order. Specifying rhythm then pitch is inconvenient. I do a lot of my notating at the computer without any paper reference and I need to hear the pitch before committing it to the score. Otherwise I waste time deleting notes just entered because I guessed wrong on the pitch. Being able to specify picth before rhythm (as in Sibelius and Finale) solves that problem.
2a) Drum kit issues. As you’ve seen in this thread, I need to be able to combine bar repeats, slashes, notes etc without items being unmoveable or unsizeable.
2b) The workarounds for getting drum cues looking right don’t always carry over to the individual part, and engraving tweaks I make in the score often have to be done again in the part. This also pertains to more ordinary operations as well. For example the “cresc poco a poco” I just added to my test score shows up as a hairpin in the part. The adjustment to the hairpin to have it draw as “cresc” did not carry over to the part.
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Chords. - I need different chords for different rhythm instruments. While chords are sometimes used to indicate the current prevailing harmony, sometimes they are just used as notational shorthand for that particular player and don’t directly correspond to a prevailing harmony.
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Ability to see what bar I’m working on regardless of where I’m looking in the score.
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Lyric entry buffering - I recently re-engraved some piano vocal sheets using Dorico. They were filled with typos where the first letter of a lyric syllable is missing. During lyric entry, while the cursor is moving to the next note, typing gets ignored. I type quickly so a lot of lyrics get mangled this way.
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Swing playback
–Neil
Thanks, Neil. I appreciate you taking the time to provide the list. I am confident that in time we will address all of these issues, some of them no doubt more quickly than others.
Creating drum parts this way seems to be very tedious. The goal is to produce a readable drum part quickly. In talking to drummers, they want to see treble instrument cues above the staff on the “B” line. Bass instruments below the staff on the “C” line. In Sibelius, I was able to copy let’s say the lead trumpet line into a new voice in the drum part and then use the plugin “Make pitches constant” to place that lead trumpet figure on to the “B” line above the staff. Is there some way to do this in Dorico?
Stan
Maybe make a goal to have Dorico recognize that when you “Paste special” into a drum part, that you are given the choice of placing it above or below the staff at a constant pitch. That would speed up workflow dramatically!!!
If you could use the regular cue feature with a drum kit staff, then I think all of these problems would become moot. It’s something we plan to do but have not yet been able to tackle. Hopefully we will be able to solve this in the relatively near future.
Neil,
I’ve created a couple of nice looking drumset parts, almost as good as in Sibelius, but it only works if you can live without the playback.
I’m simply using a nontransposing treble clef instrument (e.g. Flute…) and rename it to drum set. Then you can also use Cues if you want, and you can scale any note or rest as you wish.
I do have to say, I’ve been working with Dorico for around a year now, and the drum set is a continuous source of frustration. I, too, have taken to using other instruments and renaming them as workarounds, but I find it an irritant of the sort that made me give up on Finale after years of slavish habit. If the drum set can’t behave in a uniform fashion with the rest of the instruments, why have it in the first place? It’s not worth the trouble for the MIDI instrument alone - better to simply track that in in a DAW afterword. Even the regular unhitched percussion is weird, for some unknown reason - why can’t I simply score different notes at the regular clef equivalent? Why aren’t successive notes on the staff a stepwise motion from each other? The whole realm of non-orchestral percussion notation is a morass, and I’ve been waiting for a Dorico type of common-sense solution for so long…
matanr, what in particular do you find problematic about working with the drum kit in Dorico? If it’s the issue of not being able to edit rests, or not being able to apply rhytmic cues easily, those are certainly issues we plan to address in future. But in general I think users tend to find the approach Dorico takes to drum kits to make sense.
For other kinds of unpitched percussion, I imagine the issue is that you want to just write notes at any position on a five-line staff and not worry about what instrument those notes correspond to? You can do that, of course, in the manner you suggest (i.e. using a pitched instrument and just changing iits label) but I would definitely advise against it. Once you have your kit set up the way you like it, you should find that it’s more or less the same kind of thing as working on a regular pitched staff, except that you can’t input notes anywhere except where you have an instrument mapped. This gives you much greater flexibility in future should you need to redistribute your percussion instruments between players, or produce a percussion score instead of a five-line staff as a part, etc.