While I’m one of those composers trained to write with pen and paper, I’m more and more used to MIDI recording, for a series of reasons.
Playing instead of writing means that you have a credible interpretation, together with clean score representation. The long years with Notator and Logic have made me consider this natural.
Writing notes sometimes takes something out of what you tried on the piano. Expressivity, real meaning of a phrase, emotion.
Entering music by recording can be faster. No need to juggle with durations, pitches, bar boundaries, rests vs. sounding notes, octaves, chords – just play it, and it’s there!
Then we’re very lucky that you’re not the developer of Dorico!
Performance it’s everything with samples. To me, Dorico should be the best of both worlds, Notation & MIDI Mock-Ups, so I can write and orchestrate with the same great sound I got with Cubase or LPX.
Otherwise, there’s no point in changing from Sibelius.
Paolo - You described it very good, These are exactly the reasons I use it in Sibelius + Sometimes it helps me understand how to write a complex rhythm phrase
Then we’re very lucky that you’re not the developer of Dorico!
Performance it’s everything with samples. To me, Dorico should be the best of both worlds, Notation & MIDI Mock-Ups, so I can write and orchestrate with the same great sound I got with Cubase or LPX.
Otherwise, there’s no point in changing from Sibelius.
All the best to the Dorico team
Agreed, we already have capable professional notation only tools like Sibelius that will suffice for a lot of people. What the market doesn’t have is a fully integrated notation/DAW tool for composers who want to notate and produce pro level Midi mockups in one program. Dorico will really be game-changing if it achieves that, otherwise Dorico is just another notation product and we’ll still live in a world where pros will use separate programs for notation and midi production.
… otherwise Dorico is just another notation product and we’ll still live in a world where pros will use separate programs for notation and midi production.
Oh wow. Just another notation product? How can anyone state a thing like that? Having been using and teaching other pro guys to use both Finale and Sibelius for as long as they have existed, Dorico is now my main composing tool. Because it is NOT “just another notation product”. Thank you, Daniel and the team.
Not to delve in, but I get what Eboats is saying - I, too, have been in search of the “Holy Grail” of a program in which I could do “finished product” level output (as I currently do in Logic Pro) and also a beautiful score at the same time. I’ve tried (and quickly dismissed!) Logic’s own Score editor (which seemingly hasn’t seen a meaningful update since Logic 4.x), experimented with Overture (one of the first notation programs I recall to have a piano roll editor, despite it’s actual notation limitations), tried performance tweaks in Sibelius, and am now very excited by the prospects presented in Dorico. Most of my work is for television where deadlines are critical and it’s important to make clear one’s musical intent such that it sounds as close as possible to the final product (and, in some lower-budget cases, IS the final product). Up until now I’ve seen no single program that allows me to actually compose to this level and then also produce a final score in the same program. Dorico is exciting because it’s the first time to me I can see this on the horizon (once they add a click, realtime MIDI recording of notes/controller data, a bit more functionality to their Play Mode and - perhaps further down the line - some sort of audio syncing, perhaps via something similar to Rewire or a better solution). Until then, I will continue to have to split up the tasks: Logic for the “performance”; plus a notation program (which is fast becoming Dorico for me) for notation-only (after cleaning up/exporting the Logic midi file). So until this is 100% possible, Dorico will remain another program for the notation part, as Eboats suggests (albeit the best one!), with the performance/final musical product part done elsewhere (though I look forward to this changing soon!)
It’s already mentioned that real time recording and probably more and more daw options will be added, so it’s just a matter of waiting and enjoying the ride .
First off, your claim to the blanket term of “composer” is disputable. There are composers working in all sorts of different traditions and practices. To impose your own workflow on all composers is at least unpractical, if I’m being easy of the adjectives.
But to be clear, it’s not about requesting this or that feature. Arguments that go all-in-or-nothing, declaring Dorico to be useless because it doesn’t do x or that the developers are clearly ignoring y, was what I meant by “this”. It didn’t make sense before, it definitely doesn’t make any sense after 2.0. That composers, of all people, don’t understand what it means to work iteratively is just mystifying to me.
Yes, at this moment every little improvement in the MIDI Area/Play Mode is a little dream come true. The implementations that we media composers need will be ready in Dorico…4 perhaps?
As you can see, many composers are happy with the tools they already have. And maybe they are the primarily target of the Dorico team, which explains the lack of many essential features for the rest of us.
100% of the fellow composers that I know have the same technical needs as me. But obviously this forum is different.
I’m sure he meant “for many composers” so let’s not split hairs (with all due respect). And no one is saying that Dorico is “useless” without certain features - it’s by far the best notation program already, even after just a couple of years. All we’re saying is that until one can do a certain minimum of functionality that is normally achieved in a DAW, for composers for media we’ll continue to be patient and compose in DAW’s (for mock-ups and finished product), and export to Dorico for the notation portion. I’m excited, frankly, that we’re talking about this at all and am confident that they will get to these added features (as Daniel would put it) “in due course”.
By the same token, most DAWs allow you to drag an arbitrary MIDI file from outside the DAW and drop it on any tracks. This ought to be on the list of goals for Dorico. Such a thing could be particularly useful in entering drum set parts.
There is already (very) basic support for dragging and dropping regions of MIDI into Dorico: if you grab a region in Cubase and drag it into Play mode, it will be imported onto the staff you drag it onto. It’s a little hard to control exactly where it will be imported, but it’s at least the beginning of something useful in that direction.
Exactly, just pointing out the continued need to be working in one program for notation and another program for pro level Midi production. Maybe not a problem for some, but definitely not convenient for others. The fact that Steinberg has both Dorico and Cubase is a huge advantage over the competition, assuming the road plans for those products eventually converge in some way.
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