Cubase score editor - defunct?!

Firstly congrats on getting things this far - I will certainly be starting to save my pennies.

Whilst integration into Cubase is promised in the future makes it even more appealing but it’s going to take me some time to save the cash and I hope I won’t lose the support/development of the Cubase score editor in the mean time.

Don’t worry: the Cubase score editor continues to be under the stewardship of its longtime developer, Michael Michaelis, and his team at HQ in Hamburg. I don’t know exactly what is planned for future versions of Cubase with regard to the score editor, but I do know that there are no short-term plans to remove or replace it.

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thanks! Phew.

Still, can’t wait until I’ve got the cash together for this!

With development of Dorico virtually in a ‘distant land’ (relatively), the two scoring solutions are still quite independent and I would say that for at least a while, they will continue to co-exist.

I wouldn’t be surprised that, eventually, after recovering some (if not all) of the resources poured into the development of Dorico, Steinberg would start plans to fold Dorico into other products (mainly Cubase), and phase out the old Cubase. This may take a few years to happen (we would need to have some sort of backward compatibility, perhaps), but it would make sense for them to eliminate the duplication of effort.

That makes no sense to me. The Score Editor is just as important as the Key Editor or List Editor. There is no reason to remove it. If I want high powered notation that is when I would use Dorico but the Score Editor is an important part of Cubase. It would be ridiculous to have to sync with Dorico just to see my part in notation.

The problem is that I’d say the majority of Cubase users do not use the Score editor as their primary composing tool - not sure If its any indication of this, but just look through the Cubase forum - score related questions seem to be minimal. I’d guess that the majority of users are electronic/EDM enthusiasts, where audio loops, fx processing are more important than notation. So does Steinberg incorporate a high end notation package that may not be appreciated by the majority of its users, incorporate more DAW like features into Dorico or a new package altogether? Either way I’d be happy. I like the flexibility Cubase offers, but long for a fully featured score editor that has expression mapping intelligently implemented.

The ideal solution, at some point in the future, would be a simple question when loading up some new version of Cubase.

We notice you have Dorico installed. Would you like to use Dorico as your score editing tool within Cubase?”.

Upfront of seeing and working with it, I think you could probably time my response to that question in milliseconds…

My answer, without any doubt, is YES :exclamation: :smiley: And this is the reason I use Cubase for scoring, and not Sibelius or Finale.

I’ve been using Cubase since it was Pro 24 on an Atari ST. Score Edit was, for a long time, my default edit page for MIDI tracks. Possibly because I felt it was more appropriate for a “proper musician” :slight_smile: But I came to realise that it was less useful than Key Edit (the “piano roll” view) when dealing with a musical performance. It was forcing a quantised approach, which often sucked the life out of the music.

No doubt that would be awesome if that happened in the future! I used Finale for years and switched to Sibelius 3 years ago at the time of the Avid purchase. So many things in with meter that would need to be worked out in Cubase though. Love the chord integration and pulling from the chord track. No doubt a lot of programing involved to pull that one off and are a good 5 years off. Steinberg Forums

I am sure you realize this but just in case, you can quantize visually without sucking the life out of a musical performance and get the benefit of both worlds. I think that was added in Cubase 5 or 6.

This is something I think about a lot. I grew up with the dots and think in dots, but writing in dots does quantise and dumb down expression. I actually like Cubase Score, it works and it gets bad press, but it can do a lot. I was hoping that Dorico was going to integrate with Cubase well, maybe have note expression and expression map capabilities. I dream of the day when I can select a series of staccato notes from any string package for an individual note, in score, right click and then craft the sound of the note as is my whim. At present Dorico seems to be Sibelius MkII, why splash any cash?

Dorico will support both VST Note Expression and VST Expression Maps sooner rather than later. It will also support the editing of note durations etc. graphically via the event display editor in Play mode, sooner rather than later. You may not find that the very first release of Dorico is more than “Sibelius MkII” for your tastes (though I think when you try Dorico for yourself you will find that is certainly not the case), but we’re not going to stop developing Dorico the day it comes out.

Well, some of us stopped using “Sibelius MkI” years ago, simply because it won’t do what we want for producing notation, or it needs so much tweaking to get what we want that it’s not worth the effort. And if you look at the new features in recent versions of Sibelius, notation-related improvements have pretty much stopped (or in one recent case, it’s taken four consecutive releases to get a relatively trivial notation improvement working still-not-quite-correctly!)

YMMV, of course.

Rob:
DO you know the Magritte Painting “This is not a pipe?” Its a picture of a pipe - but it’s NOT a pipe, its a picture of a pipe.
Its the same with score editors - they are not scores, we use the idea of a score - that grubby folder with and scribble on it - to re- present changes in MIDI data, expression, etc. I think the classical gang and Sibelius, and other ‘sc ore’ packages get too hung up on the ‘notation’ side of things - what font, how to place the accent - ya de yah…
For me a powerful editor should of course have some flexible ways of representing notation on paper, but it’s integration with other aspects of its sound that make it powerful. Many people were writing one version for real life players and another for a mock up. Cubase’s score got so far with this, with display quantise, but there is so much more that can be done, so long as we don’t confine ourselves to just representing an image of a piece of paper, and think more imaginative about how we might craft individual notes -select sounds, articulations, apply envelopes, dynamics (not the notation type), expression, right there, in the score. This is where the power of Cubase comes in.
So far there is no creativity its still the ‘Pipe’ .

I didn’t quit Sibelius because of “the fonts or how to place accents”, but for more basic reasons - like it can’t even get the accidentals correct for reasonably complex keyboard music (and a list of similar basic problems, but this isn’t the place to list them).

But if you think Cubase Score can handle a few hundred pages of music like this, I might investigate it…

Rob, Cubase Score has handled for me quite more than hundreds of pages (sometimes in the same project)…
This doesn’t absolutely mean that it’s not possible to get something better :wink:

I don’t think Dorico v1 will be able to tackle Sorabji either… :slight_smile:

Don’t underestimate it! This is imported from MusicXML. All I did was spend 30 seconds hiding staff labels, reshaping the cross-staff slur on the final system, and reducing the staff size a little. Obviously you could improve the look of the page further with lots of additional editing, but this isn’t a bad result, I think you’ll agree.

Nicely understated, Daniel.

Wow – that is pretty impressive. The accidentals in bar 4 look a bit cluttered (and some of them are redundant) … but if this is the near default for engraving in Dorico, that looks really good. :astonished:

ps on a side note, do people actually play this kind of music? Just looking at the score gives me vertigo …