Let me preface this with the fact that Dorico has enabled me to compose far more and faster than I’ve ever been able to do in my life, and it is without a doubt a game changer like few ever software has been. I’ve already moved most of my portfolio into it (save a couple of big orchestral works). and I spend more time in it than just about any other software package.
That said, here are some of my most wanted features/changes:
I just finished a big, multiple-movement work for pianos and percussion. While I like the concept of percussion kits, in a multiple movement/flow work, you have to include the same kit for all flows. As far as I can tell, you can’t exclude, say the woodblocks in a kit from the second movement by selecting that flow and unchecking some checkbox in the instrument setup list (it’s only top level instruments not in kits). The only workarounds are to either leave those instruments out of a kit or make multiple kits – but then you end up with Dorico numbering instruments in both kits, even though they are the same woodblock, (not woodblock 1 and 2), just in a kit that is the same except that it omits or adds a couple of other percussion instruments only used/unused in that flow.
I appreciate the ability to adjusting the distances between staves and then copying the widths from page to page, that only works if you don’t hide or add any instrument/staff. Any differences and the Copy Widths… command just stops working. I understand that a 1 to 1 correspondence is the only way to get a predictable result, but perhaps a warning, or skipping over the affected pages to others in the range that are the same staves as the page you are copying from the same might be helpful (and again, letting the user know what’s been done). That way, if I have just 1 page where I added an extra piano stave and then hid it on all the subsequent pages wouldn’t throw a monkey wrench into the whole staff distance copying attempt.
I’ll renew my wish for cut-out score support. They are so much easier to conduct from and I’m sure they shouldn’t be that hard to incorporate.
Some way of making a fermata create a pause in playback. I dislike having to go in and fake some sort of extreme tempo change for 1 beat - that feels like a hack and it almost never works as it should. I’d also love for more ornaments to do what they say (If I have to specify it’s a Mozart-style turn rather than a Baroque one then so be it, but I could do that in the bottom area where that sort of minutiae goes.)
Echoing the request to be able to apply performance edits to NotePerformer. In fact, better integration with it in general would be great - when I want to see what’s applied to an instrument I’ve written for, I have to jump through all sorts of strange navigations. I know that they are 2 products but it’s not as if you have 2 big companies trying to dance together.
I know that we are encouraged to use the keyboard input (or MIDI step edit, for that matter) for note entry, but would it be possible to be able to drag a note up or down once it’s been entered (or even a chord or note in a chord)? So many times I’ve wanted to tweak one note or chord and then have to take hands off the mouse, where I’ve been changing something else and revert to keyboard arrow plus option key or shift-option key etc., which feels very much like antiquated UI from the early days of computers when direct manipulation wasn’t stressed.
I’d like to be able to temporarily mute/solo instruments from Page view, rather than having to go to the Play screen where I have the DAW environment. I am one of those few people who ‘gets’ the traditional view of music and is thrown off by the piano roll notation of the Play tab. Being able to solo an instrument(s) and then click on the note you want to start on and hit ‘P’ is preferable, particularly if they are not near each other in the score because the current UI requires that some multiple notes in both instrunents be selected to solo them.
That’s what I’ve got for today.
Since the Stream Deck entered my life, this all went away! Since the SD can do many things (i.e. the most common things…) with one keypress, I keep my hand on the mouse, select, press button to edit, done!
I know it’s extra money, but it is the solution in this case.
Thanks for sharing your feedback, David. I’ll reply to a couple of your points below, as they might improve your quality of life when using the current Dorico version.
If you give each kit to a separate player, and put each of those players in their own group, they won’t get numbered automatically. Here is more information about the circumstances in which Dorico numbers instruments:
Ideally, you shouldn’t need to be adjusting lots of staves on lots of pages. Could you perhaps share some examples of where you’ve needed to do this? It could be that some tweaks to your layout’s vertical spacing settings and/or changing some of the minimum gaps between various items and each other/the staff in Engraving Options will get you much closer to your ideal result.
You can do this already: either in the Mixer (which you can show as a separate window in any mode, or as a panel in the lower zone in Write, Engrave, and Play modes) ; or by using the option to solo selected instruments, which works in Write mode as well as Play mode.
There are also a couple of handy key commands for deactivating mute/solo states to get you back to “everyone plays”, which again work in any mode.
I use this all the time. Selecting multiple notes in one player solos that player; selecting a note and then CTRL+ Clicking a note in each instrument one wants to add allows me to audition several instruments without the others.
Well. It works fine for soloing parts. But when working with Noteperformer and I want to mute a single track out of 10 or so, I have to got to play mode, open the right NP and then mute the instrument. Since the single instruments of NP aren’t reflected kn the Dorico mixer but only on the NP mixer. I sometimes even prefer to copy a phrase, then delete it, listen back an paste it again, since that is faster in some cases.
I also would love to mute an entire line or an bunch of selected notes.
We really need “scrub play”. Nothing is faster than that for quick verification of the notes.
Scrubbing Playback (in Finale)
If you’d like to simply click on any measure to play it back, or would like to quickly hear just one instrument of your score, this is a cool trick.
Hold down two keys (on Windows press Ctrl+Spacebar, on Mac press Option+Spacebar) while you pass the mouse over the area of music you want to scrutinize. As you do you will hear the sonorities involved, with full instrumentation. This action lets you hear only the area you want to hear when you want to hear it.
To hear a single staff, add the Shift key to the other two keys. Now you will hear just one staff at a time as you pass your mouse over your music.
I’ve heard this described as an “Audition” feature as well as “Scrubbing Playback.” No matter what you call it, it’s a time saver.
Definitely, as long as I can continue to edit note pitches, rhythmic position, durations, articulations, slurs, and dynamics while the loop is playing – otherwise there isn’t much point in looping. And this could get a little tricky if the window has to shift while playing. Maybe there could be a way to turn off the automatic shifting altogether during loop playback.
One thing that makes Cubase different from other DAWs is it’s extensive macro capabilities. I would love to see something like this for Dorico as well so that I may begin to automate certain tasks that I do all the time. I know, easier said that done. Cubase has been achieving this through decades of work and maturity.
Dorico does already have some Lua scripting abilities, which do enable you to automate certain tasks. I have one to do things like Transpose every Flow.
It’s a bit basic, and there’s no ‘feedback’, e.g. you can’t get the status of anything, but the plan has always been to improve it to a fully featured scripting environment.
same for me: I would love to use looping in order to practice difficult parts. At the moment I have to export midi from Dorico to Cubase for that purpose: So a loop in Dorico would be a big time saver in my case without any need for editing while the loop is running.
I have to admit that the things that got worse are fixed in the meantime. So there are only the flaws and bugs left that were already there in Dorico 3.5 – and that are a lot
The most annoying thing is: If you have built a chord symbol, let’s say Bm7/b5 (and yes, the academy were I teach wants that slash), you can’t copy that to another root letter like to Am7/b5 – you have to built the whole thing from scratch, choosing fonts, sizes, distances etc.
My wish list for the preferences would start like that:
– Change the distance between the A and the 7 in A7
– Choose if the 7 should be considered just one of the elements on the higher level (like b9 or #11) or been treated separately (as Dorico always does).
– Choose slash a a divider, not only space or comma
– Choose different fonts for root letter and additions
My wish list for the custom chord symbol module would start like that:
– Copy elements or complete groups of additions (like m7/b5) from one chord symbol to another, or better: Treat these groups of additions separately from the root letter
– Complete renovation of the module where I build the chord symbols from scratch. It takes 2 minutes to build a quite normal chord symbol – and only if I know all the distance numbers before and need not to try out things.
And there’s much more …
I hope you get my point (sorry, my native language is german). If you are interested in a closer look I could do a screen video and send it to you.
For me chord symbols are crucial – most of the time I do leadsheets or gospel choir arrangements with many different symbols, and the results have to be ready for publishing.
Thanks for your feedback, Peter. I know that it would be ideal if you could reuse every part of an existing chord symbol apart from the root, and this is something we’d like to make possible in future.
For some types of symbols there’s a global way to make a change using a doricolib file. Unfortunately, there’s no documentation so what I’ve managed to figure out has mostly been by experimenting with them. Do you globally want the suffix alterations to have a slash rather than parentheses, like this?
If so, here’s a quick doricolib file that will do that for you. ChordSymbolSlashOpen.zip (1002 Bytes)
Unzip it, then place it in the “Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\Dorico 4\DefaultLibraryAdditions” folder in Windows, or wherever the DefaultLibraryAdditions lives on a Mac, and restart Dorico. The file simply redefines the chord symbol open parenthesis to be a slash, and the closed parenthesis to be nothing. Other than that it should still follow all your Engraving Options, if you don’t want superscripted suffix alterations for example. You can return to the default settings by simply deleting the file, or moving it out of that folder if it’s not helpful.
What I really would want is for Dorico to spread to a lot of new paying users. This would allow the great team to continue adding functions and support for new environment (such as lately the apple Mx chips).
I still find that it is a bit too high entry step for a new user. I guess it would help to find a bunch of totally new users and “record” what they do and what confuses them. I have som pet things that confused me as well as a new user I tried to start on Dorico.
Transposed pitch / Concert Pitch: current status is shown at the bottom of the screen but nothing happens when you click if you want to change. You have to find it in the menus and it is not in the expected place (for the new user) View. Not arguing about menu placement but it should be clickable.
Slurs: just about everything else in the GUI is “cancelled” by clicking it except for slurs. Start note entry, click on slur – click again and, well the slurs simply doubles and doubles and doubles. How should a new user know that he should use the keyboard and say Shift-S?
default playback: out of the box, start a new song, add some notes and listen to the playback. It is extremely soft. So the user increases computer volume, and well when going to a web page it is extremely loud.
