Dorico for Apple Watch

The real composers’ assistant!

Does any of your chant have parallel 4ths too? You better “watch” out (yuk, yuk).

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Maybe the Dorico watch app can slow down time when deadlines approach. And speed it up for… uh… sermons?

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I’m looking forward to Dorico for Apple VR Headset!

On an even more serious note: Finale has a setting that allows you to play back a recording and tap the Spacebar to record in tempo changes (I just opened Finale to try it and had to breathe into a paper bag, so I don’t remember how to do it).

That would be amazing to have in Dorico. In my opinion, one of the most challenging things about creating a natural-sounding mock-up (not realistic, but natural) is the nuance of tempo.

I’ve asked for it before, so this isn’t a bump, just dreaming…

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When you do (did?) the tap tempo in Finale, did you do the entire piece? I have been tempted to try it on sections but could never seem to get the tempi to transition smoothly from existing speed to altered speed and back.

I don’t remember much of anything about my time in Finale, I’m afraid!

I admit, I now sometimes have to struggle to recall how to do something when I revisit Finale.

I’ve kicked around the idea of using a theremin for this, you can even be conducting, in theory. Moog has a couple, I assume they give you a CV or CC output which might be used for the purpose. Might be better to just do a DNN, shouldn’t be too hard to visually detect the baton beats.

But really doing subtle rubato is pretty easy with Dorico in the Play mode isn’t it? VSL did a great demo of that, what was it, the Barber? <…> no here it is in my history, the Ravel school piece (I heard Thibaudet play this as an encore which was wonderful). Anyhow great demonstration of the power of your point, they nuance the tempo all over the place (watch the blue “Gradual Tempo” sign posts). Seems to be mainly that and CC11.

The weakness here is that tempo has to be visually worked out, then played back to confirm it’s what you want. I don’t want “ritard to 75% of original tempo,” or “q=58.6.” I want to know how it feels.

Much better to record the tempo changes in the same way as the music exists: in real time, while listening.

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I’ve been doing this a bit lately: attaching a video of the famous opera piece I just copied into Dorico, and used the video sound as a target to match with tempo changes. It takes time — the more time I spend, better the result. But then the playback makes more musical sense.
I remembered I asked John to make a discover session in conjunction with a Cubase guru, in order to create a tempo track inside Cubase (which has tools to recognize tempi, although probably not in a classical piece) and import it into Dorico… But alas that hasn’t been done yet.

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Fair point, but when’s the last time you conducted and everybody actually responded to your arm waving in a nuanced way? In my experience it’s usually a matter of using your voice to yell at them to play more expressively :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: (and in all seriousness, on the other end playing as a soloist in the clarinet section it’s a sloppy process of working with your conductor. Seems like only the violins think what the conductor wants is obvious - and they can hide in numbers).

This is no joke… If you had video’d our Christmas eve services (actually, I’m pretty sure they did) you might suspect that the audio and video where out of sync if you listened to the small orchestra and watched the conductor.

So maybe we take tempo from the conductor’s watch, compare to the players watch, and zap certain players that refuse to play at anything other than their own personal dirge tempo? Could be used as an effect also… get some robust sfz that way (evil grin)

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Best conductor I ever worked with was MTT/Michael Tilson Thomas. He started us (Bartok Conerto for Orchestra I think), then stopped after a bar. Started us a again - we were a bit more focused, and stopped. Finally looked around and you could hear a pin drop, started us a third time and we nailed it. Didn’t say a word but he had our full attention

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