There is chord mode for adding notes without advancing the caret. You can toggle it on & off with Q.
I would just like to take a moment to marvel publicly at Daniel’s post #49, above.
I don’t think any of us has ever seen faster response on such complex software anywhere else in the world. These new features in a point release! For this we can credit the consistent vision and extremely methodical approach the Dorico team has maintained since first conception.
Incorporating new note entry features onto Phil Farrand’s Finale would have been nearly impossible, which is why it never happened. He did an astounding job creating the first version, but it was not an architecture that could handle future expansion. (And of course he retired from software authoring after doing it – thus the name.)
Anyway, thank you, team, for always listening, and working to make your product better and better.
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@Mark Johnson: Absolute agreement to your previous post #62!
Thank you for emphazising this!
Indeed I had very similar words in mind, but have been so busy in Dorico, that I didn’t write it down.
@Daniel Spreadbury & team: I sign every word from Mark Johnson!
All the best, and thank you!
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I am glad to hear of such a quick developer response to something that so many of us Finale users are grappling with. This is a very positive thing I see in Dorico!
One more foundational capablity of Speedy Entry, for me at least, that I don’t see that anyone else has yet addressed:
My normal workflow is to enter the melody first, then return and enter the chords. In Speedy Entry this is a simple matter of moving the caret (shadow note) up or down to the desired position on the staff, then pressing Enter to enter a chord on the same stem without having to respecify duration―much faster than even the original melody entry.
Is there any way to duplicate this in Dorico? When entering chords with “pitch before duration” I can’t figure out any way to actually input the note without using a number key to respecify the duration.
I already remapped my key commands to (mostly) mimic the Speedy Entry commands that Daniel talks of introducing. But I’m not seeing any key command option capable of “add shadow note to current stem”.
Note: I do not own a MIDI keyboard. My scoring is exclusively for accapella music, usually simple SATB scores. So I enter the soprano, then the tenor. Then I return to enter the alto and bass on the same stems. I only have to switch to a different voice when the rhythms diverge.
(Coming from an entirely accapella setting, my knowledge of technical musical terms is limited. Please correct me if I’ve used them incorrectly.)
I am mostly inputting existing scores, usually non-English. (My main project right now is a songbook in K’ekchi’―the largest Mayan language of Guatemala.)
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- Though I was a heavy Finale speedy entry user, I never knew about the “press enter” method of entering chord notes to the same stem – I always used the number keys to add chord notes … it was kind of annoying when there was a dotted rhythm, because re-entering a rhythm undotted what you had before, and you always had to re-dot it after. Doh!
Curiousity: How did you deal with the caret always jumping to the next measure because that one was “full” (as in, if you enter a note on beat one, and the rest of the measure already has notes completing it, it leaps ahead to the next measure)? - I think chord mode is as close as it gets in Dorico. I actually felt it was a huge improvement on Finale’s precisely because it didn’t leap ahead to the next measure every time I entered a chord note in a full measure, and the dot/re-dot issue went away. Doesn’t seem like a huge problem to me to use the numbers to input durations (which you already do with the first two voices), but then, I never knew any better in finale.
Even this monodic entry is still substantially faster with even a micro 2octave midi keyboard.
As for adding chords, Dorico has always had “lock to duration”. You press L, and can play whatever you want on a keyboard and it will replace the existing rhythms with new notes. Again, even a tiny keyboard can make this type of work FLY by.
And for touch-enabled computers, don’t forget there is the option for an on-screen keyboard 
in the lower panel. Heck, it works with mice too, if you wanted to do it, although I’m not sure it would benefit you much.
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Dorico has two useful modes for this. Lock Duration (L) will re-pitch existing durations to new notes – but if you use this with Chord mode (Q), you can add extra notes to your existing notes.
You have to press Space to move to the next note (because in Chord mode, you just keep adding notes to the current note); but it’s still pretty fast.
I’d also say that using a MIDI keyboard is still the fastest way to add a pitch, in any notation software. You can get small 25-note USB-powered models for about 30 $€£.
(Also, as a Tenor and former Alto, I much prefer having my own stem all the time!)
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Curiousity: How did you deal with the caret always jumping to the next measure because that one was “full” (as in, if you enter a note on beat one, and the rest of the measure already has notes completing it, it leaps ahead to the next measure)?
In Finale this only happens when you use the number keys to specify the note duration. When using the Enter key to enter more noteheads to the same stem, the caret doesn’t move at all. You have to use the arrow keys to move to the next note every time.
I notice when I use chord mode Q, lock to duration L and pitch before duration K all at the same time, I can add single notes to chords and the caret advances to the next note automatically. With duration before pitch, the caret stays put and I can keep adding notes until I press Space to advance to the next note. So it appears we can have the best of both already.
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Thank you for this input. I wasn’t familiar with using Lock Duration.
However, when I turn on Lock Duration I immediately lose my shadow note. So whether using “Pitch before duration” or “Duration before pitch” with Lock Duration I can only add additional notes via A-G―no Speedy cursor. After entering the note I can then move it up and down but this is very tedious to use as a primary note entry method.
I can imagine that a MIDI keyboard could be very fast for someone used to playing piano/organ/keyboard. But I come from a setting of strictly vocal music and have never played any of those. So the music I hear in my head is entirely on a relative scale (do, re, mi) not absolute (C, D, E). Of course I understand how the two relate. But for intuitive note entry, relative scale thinking is still far faster for me than absolute scale.
I should add that I also work entirely with shaped notes, known in Dorico as “Aikin 7-shape”. To those having grown up without them (and with instruments), they may appear foolish. But for strictly vocal music (relative scale) they make all the sense in the world. (And studies have been done showing that teaching children to sight read vocal music is far faster with shaped notes.)
I did learn that I can type “R” to repeat the last note entered. But in Chords mode this repeats the entire last chord―not usually what I want to do.
Looks like maybe entering the chords with a mouse might be the best option available, though it will take quite a while to be as fast as what I’m used to.
Actually, the more I think about it the more a MIDI keyboard seems like a good idea. So I ordered one and will see how it goes with that. Though Dorico doesn’t include all the functionality of Finale (and a lot of functionality that Finale doesn’t have―I really like the programmable shortcuts) I think there is hope that I can learn a new input method that will work for me.
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@Daniel:
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!.. […] so much!
Updated to Dorica 5.1.60, read your Blog-Entry here…
and, well…, Dorico now understands the “Speedy-Entry”-Method.
Wow! Thank you!!
Adding the ALT-Key in addition to arrow-keys is completely ok for me. Understand the design-principles behind it perfectly.
For me it’s like coming home! Without any exaggeration!
Again: Thank you for the time, implementing this solution in such an complex pice of software!
And maybe…, probably Thank you even in the name of thousands of “Finalists”.
Made my day! Great! 
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Attempting to set the keys as shown in the video did not work. I was able to work around it by removing all references to the down and up arrow keys before using them for shadow notes.
REPRO NOTES
After hearing about the update, I downloaded and installed Version 5.1.60.2187 (Oct 8 2024)
I open preferences, select “Key Commands” (as a UI developer, it would be nice if “Search categories…” did a global search like many other apps, but I digress…) search for shadow, and select “Lower Shadow Note by Step”
So far so good. I click on “Press shortcut”, press the down arrow key, wait a second or two for “Add Key Command” to light up and then press it. I get the warning dialog noted in the video. I click “OK” and the modal dialog vanishes - but so does the preferences dialog.
When I navigate back into preferences, down arrow was not set (and I confirmed it does not work for entry either). I have tried closing Dorico and restarting a couple of times, and nothing will make it accept down arrow while it is mapped elsewhere.
Expected result: remapping works as noted in the video and described in the warning dialog.
It’s possible your key commands JSON file has got a bit screwy.
Are you on Mac or Windows? I certainly can’t replicate this.
Little question. You don’t mention to click on Apply. Did you do that?
The problem is on my computer (Windows): when I click on “Ok” on the modal dialog, the Preferences window jumps behind the Dorico window. By clicking on the little icon of Dorico, down in your screen, you see also the Preferences window. Click on that window, now it appears again and click on Apply in the bottom right corner after all steps you did. (You have to do all the steps again, because they were not saved.)
Yup, that’s it. It’s a Z-order bug, probably in Qt, though I would imagine the fine folks at Dorico could code a work-around for it.
I tried to ask this question with Steinberg support and they referred me to this forum thread without answering the question. So here is the question again:
I want to hear the sounds of shadow notes while using pitch-before-duration, including when I arrow them up and down, etc…but then I don’t want to hear the note again a second time when I hit the duration key.
The problem is that now there are two preferences, one is to audition the sound while inputting and editing, and the other is to audition the shadow notes. If I turn off the first preference, then shadow note auditioning also gets turned off even though it checked. This must be a bug I’m not sure, or maybe there is some secret trick? Really what I want is that when I’m editing I want to hear notes. (first checkbox). Ok. And when I’m inputting notes, I want to hear the sounds as I am selecting pitches with letters or arrows, (second option), but what I absolutely do not want is to have to hear the sound twice, once when I select the pitch and again when I select the duration…and there does not appear to be any way to setup this preference in a sensible way.
Honestly…
I appreciate the inclusion of some things in Dorico to try and emulate speedy note entry but I do feel like they have currently missed the mark because of trying to include the caret into note before duration mode.
In Finale, I used a midi keyboard for speedy note entry, and then I would use the number pad to input duration/rests. I can essentially input music into finale as fast as my brain can sight read. The main thing that bothers me about Dorico is that it is not very number pad friendly for inputting note values with one hand and notes with the other.
Basically… lets say I am trying to enter a quarter note on beat one, and then 2 quarter rests, and a quarter note on beat four, all in measure 1. In finale, I would hold the note I want on the keyboard, press 5, then lift up the note, press 5 twice (for the rests), and then press the note right before pressing 5 again (for the final quarter note). It is lightning fast. Lets say that I wanted to skip a measure and then do the same thing in measure three. Easy… just press the arrow key and it skips over the current measure, and I do the same thing.
In Dorico, it is difficult because even if I did want to force a duration, the caret does not adjust with the note value on the keyboard, so I have to change that, or lift up my hand to press option or whatever at the same time as the arrow key in order to skip over that blank measure. One way or another, I end up having to press that arrow key a lot more, or take my hand off of the number pad, and it is way slower.
I like the caret for editing, but I just wish it wouldn’t act like the note is depressed after I lift up my hand from the midi keyboard so I could input my rests, and then dorico would just fix those rests if I did anything weird. Additionally, I wish I could just make it skip over the whole measure with only the arrow keys without having to rip apart the keybinds for other things.
I think the main thing Dorico is misunderstanding is that a lot of Finale users used many modes of note entry for the workflow, like sometimes I would switch over to simple entry to fix mistakes and etc. People who like speedy note entry don’t really need the caret, and I’m sure they’d probably take advantage of its features in other note entry modes if it were eliminated from that particular note entry mode.
Why not just give us the ability to make our own note entry mode preset that we can swap through so that we can have an entry mode that disables the caret when we don’t need it?
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And I think the main thing Finale refugees are misunderstanding is that Dorico was never designed to emulate Finale!
A case in point. You rarely need to enter rests in Dorico!
Because it diverts valuable resources from more important developments.
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Parker,
a general remark from a very happy Dorico user and forum visitor:
Dorico is not Finale, it is an entirely different Music Notation software.
A few weeks ago another software company ended supporting their software.
There was a financially attractive offer for one of the other software companies.
Since this offer has been made and gladly taken by a lot of finale users, I can’t get rid of the impression that these new users are rather trying to hijack Dorico instead of learning it.
It takes a long time to learn and to get accustomed to it, we all went that path with good outcome. It’s never good to just be annoyed if things are different, sometimes they are just different, sometimes they might be better.
“Be prepared to learn” is a good advice in general for one’s life, it’s actually what makes us.
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