I haven’t used Dorico in recent weeks or months, and after reading a Facebook page by Claude Lapalme about how he spends an hour a day just tinkering around with Dorico and familiarizing himself with the workflow, I decided that I should do the same thing.
Is there a central repository of “how to do this or that” in Dorico? I know there are youtube videos demonstrating the features, but I’m looking more for potty training videos, where I work through simple projects, one at a time, note entry, entering slurs, ties, dynamics, changing time signatures, just basic stuff. I’m pretty familiar with Sibelius, and recently I started using StaffPad which is a hell of a lot of fun, but takes patience to learn (or better yet: it takes patience to train the program to learn my chicken scratch handwriting), so I have distractions.
Another request — can you pls. make the repository of instructional videos / materials a sticky right up the top of the Dorico page? I am not as discliplined as I would like to be, and chances are that I’ll get distracted before very long, and have to come back to this next week.
I’m afraid at the moment there’s no such material available, Peter, at least not in the form of a series of progressive exercises to work through. I hope that once we have filled in the informational gaps in our documentation we’ll be able to expand the tutorial material with a series of little projects, but it’s going to be a while before we can work on that.
I think the central point of Claude’s FB post is great: do something every day (or as near to is as you can). My time has been in fits and starts, but when I get going I start to see how this works, and I really enjoy it. Then other things come along, and I don’t get back to it; takes a few laps in the pool before in the groove again (sorry for the mixed metaphor). Yes to manual, yes to a central repository, but an even stronger yes to working with it as regularly as possible. Someone made the comment that it’s like learning a language - good analogy!
Thanks Daniel - I think I’ll (re)watch the YouTube videos, they’re pretty good, and work my way through a couple of projects. If I spend 30-60 minutes per day I’ll probably get the hang of it before very long.
The videos are key. All of those rhythmic manipulations in write mode (extending or shortening durations of notes,
dynamics etc …) for example are really well demonstrated and that stuff saves oodles of time. The program is coming along great. I’m addicted to it now!