Dorico 5 wishlist

A couple of requests:

  1. An option in Preferences so that Go To Bar can activate and place the caret at the start of that bar
  2. Instruments to be part of Navigation. So, for example, Go To would include Flow, Bar and Instrument.
6 Likes

a 5 and 8ve direct correction or alert tool

Playback of baroque ornaments.

3 Likes

There are about 30 baroque ornaments included in Bravura. This is perhaps a bit much to ask. But as a first step, it would be nice if the most common ornaments could be reproduced, such as variants of trills, mordents, turns, double cadences.

2 Likes

@Juerg_Loeffler I know it may be hard, but not impossible.

I am engraving BWV 988 at present, and I have the very fine Steinberg harpsichord VST, and I can’t even playback the Aria, as it is strewn with ornaments throughout. Such a pity.

I hope that something like the ornaments playback edit window I requested some years ago will someday be a real thing :wink:

6 Likes

When playing back baroque ornaments, there is an additional difficulty. Especially in slow movements, like the Goldberg Aria, Sarabandes, Loures etc. the execution of the ornaments is highly individual, possibly even more so on the harpsichord than on the piano, because harpsichordists are used to improvising the ornaments according to the context, e.g. in repetitions differently from the first time. So playback can only be an approximation, but at least that would be something.

I must question though: are you trying to make a reasonable demo, or are you trying to have Dorico play like a life-trained harpsichordist? I do think it is reasonable to expect certain limitations when it comes to interpretation. I wouldn’t mind the ability to define a first and second repeat iteration for a specific figure, but ultimately, I’m never going to use dorico to try and produce a professional recording. At some point, a real human needs to get involved.

I’d add the ability to have Dorico space things by moving them HORIZONTALLY rather than vertically.
This in particular applies to rehearsal marks which can be moved to the left and tempo markings that could be moved to the right, rather than having them one on top of the other.

The same thing would apply to dynamics that are further than a certain amount of space from the staff. There are times where it would be much better to place the dynamic to the left of a notehead rather than below that notehead (which causes a huge gap between staves).

5 Likes

@Romanos I did the whole WTC with Dorico and the Steinberg harpsichord, and it’s really quite superb. Obviously it’s not a human performance - that’s for me (I am a harpsichordist amongst other things) but it is astonishingly good. This is not going out for film score production or anything, but it is fantastically useful for proofing, and actually for students to listen to when learning. I’d like to do the same for BWV 988. Not having a semblance of an ornament rather spoils it all. I guess I want too much. At least let me have mordents. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Well you know (or maybe not, yet, but read on for ten seconds) you can input the notated version of every ornament adding a staff above (or below), writing it down, hiding that extra staff and (obviously) suppressing the playback of the apparent ornated note with the properties. Some more work, obviously, but if it’s really important…

1 Like

To be clear: I didn’t mean to imply that dorico should not playback ornaments; it absolutely should. My comment was mostly in response to the observation that ornamentation is highly individual. I’m just wondering whether or not it’s really worth encoding individual interpretations for every single ornament, differently for each repeat.

It is perhaps a philosophical question: how far should realistic playback go? How far high-fidelity? There are experiments in which blindfolded musicians could no longer tell for sure whether they were facing a string quartet or loudspeakers? How far should artificial intelligence go? Is there a natural limit we should not cross? Or - if it’s not an ethical question - to what point is the driven effort worthwhile?

No one will resist if playbacks become more and more realistic, even of ornaments. I can well imagine that in ten or twenty years, when we listen to the best playbacks of today, we will find them as unrealistic as we do today when we watch the animation of an old computer game or hear Enrico Caruso on a shellac record. In a live performance, besides the sound, there are always other components: the mood in the hall, the lighting, the smell, the too-tight tuxedo of the sweating conductor and … the mistakes.

1 Like

Let there be an option to have unslashed grace notes be the default. For baroque music, it’s tedious to have to change every one, and they are small and fiddly to select. I believe this has been raised by others before.

3 Likes

I know this has been discussed before — see this topic — but a bracketed property for dynamics (rather than typing brackets in as prefix and suffix text) would be nice, for creating editorial markings.

5 Likes

Definitely agree with #1. This constantly bites me. You Go To some bar, hit play and it starts playing somewhere else (you forget to position the playback cursor). It shouldn’t take two steps.

Go To Rehearsal Mark positions the playback cursor where you want it. Go To measure (and Go To page) should do the same - or at least give the option.

2 Likes

And preferably for other elements as well. The formatting of the brackets should be independent of the text they surround.

Apologies if some of these have already been mentioned:

  1. Articulation-based ms track delays in Expression Maps (hopefully MOTU doesn’t have some kind of patent on this).
  2. More routing and time-saving options in the mix window. I.e. options for aux and buss creation, ability to copy/paste or move plugins from one track to another, more than one aux input for reverb.
  3. Video Export options (I know this has been mentioned, just want to reinforce)
  4. Divisi/Independent voice playback routing saved within endpoint configurations, also have plugin chain be an option for endpoints.
  5. Ability to filter by articulation/playing technique
  6. Allow playing techniques to be assigned to grace notes (as in it will trigger corresponding articulation in the expression map).
  7. Manual override of playing technique in the key-editor
  8. More key editor drawing options (i.e. parabolic, slope etc.)
  9. Ability to import audio or even record audio into Dorico
  10. An “on/off” separate piano independent of the score for quickly working out harmonies.
  11. Ability to have separate designated Divisi instruments. As in when a divisi is triggered, the top staff of the divisi can be re-routed to a different VST, channel and/or expression map.
1 Like

Number 10 - what a brilliant idea!

3 Likes

You can have players in a flow that don’t appear in the score already, and only show them in a separate layout whilst you’re working, but you can still pop them back into the score with one click in Setup mode for easy transferring/arranging of material on that player’s staves.

Or, you could have a separate flow in the project for quickly getting ideas in, which you then copy/paste etc into the “real” flow, and delete the “ideas” flow when you’re done?

1 Like