I just tried it out. It’s a remarkable improvement over what was in Cubase before and I will definitely use it. I don’t think it’s meant to replace Dorico and nor should it. But I will actually use this new score editor in Cubase a lot, because if nothing else, when editing midi I like to look at a stave and I can easily do a lot of same or similar operations with keys that I can do in dorico to nudge notes around, quickly change their duration, pitch, etc. for now we can assign articulations that don’t matter unless expression maps catch up, but that’s ok…just being able to edit my notes on a staff very easily instead of pianoroll is literally music to my ears.
Especially love that I can have it in a consolidated window. I have been wishing for this for decades since I first saw it in samplitude many years ago. Hopefully eventually we’ll see it connected to the chord track and other cool things like that so that we can basically us the score editor to edit our DAW tracks completely instead of using a pianoroll.
There is a small annoyance inherited from Cubase. Chord Track in Cubase can’t show Cb, Fb, E# and B#. For example, Cb is shown as B even if the key signature is set to Gb and there is no way to change it neither from the Chord Track nor from the Score Editor, unless I am missing something.
One of the primary reasons I really dislike writing music in DAWs (I’ve used many, Logic, Cubase, Ableton, and PT) – is the lack of a good score editor, since I vastly prefer that to a piano roll. After many years of trying I still literally cannot look at a piano roll without cocking my head to the side and scratching my head wondering what rhythm I’m looking at… and the Cubase and Logic score editors have been pretty bad, to say the least.
I’m so excited for this development! I will still be working mostly in Dorico but I feel like this will make Cubase a lot more enjoyable to use for me when I do more hybrid & DAW-based scoring. Thanks to Steinberg, Cubase, and Dorico teams for making it happen!
I posted it there two weeks ago, but Cubase devs rarely respond so I am not even sure if it was noticed.
I just thought that it may be useful for the Dorico team to know about this now when we have this new Score Editor in which Cb vs. B distinction matters more than in the Chord Track. Sorry if the issue is not for this forum.
I’ve made a note of this. Most of Cubase outside the score editor is rather MIDI-centric and isn’t really concerned with enharmonic spelling. There are things that are easier to do on the scoring engine side, but then migrating that back into the rest of Cubase would be a much larger job.
Daniel, you know that this is the highest voted for feature request on the Cubase forum, right? Steinberg would make a lot of people happy by modernizing the expression map … shall we call it “feature area”?
Put some pepper in their panties or dangle a carrot in front of the screen - whatever it takes - get the appropriate people on board of making this a “must have” for Cubase 15.
And this comes from a guy who is not using expression maps at all.
I just read on a blog from a bloke named Daniel (no idea who that is) that Michael is still there and working. It would be so nice if he could work on streamlining all the individual areas in Cubase where note, scale, and chord names are involved. (<- see, I am even using the Oxford comma to sway you guys over)
Right now it feels like it’s been done by different people at different eras.
Yeah, Cubase doesn’t even really understand and support concept of key signature. I guess that most users would be OK with everything showing correctly in Score Editor.
Chord Track, however, does support enharmonic spelling except for the aforementioned cases and double sharps or double flats. Also, Key Editor can show correct enharmonic spelling by following the Chord Track (there is a checkbox in Preferences to turn that on). Surprisingly, Key Editor shows Cb correctly even when Chord Track doesn’t. So this looks like an oversight rather than something completely missing.
We know that Expression Maps are very important to many Cubase users. Expression Maps are also very important to almost all Dorico users too, as every Dorico user is using them, even if they don’t realise it. We have spent some time looking at them in the context of the score editor, but realised that there are some quite fundamental issues that need to be addressed, and we need the time to do that properly.
I rather suspect it will take quite some time (years) for the Dorico team and Cubase team to consolidate expression map functionality across the board in a way that makes sense for both programs. I think it will be literally numerous years before that is likely to happen and I am glad you are considering it…and will look forward to that day…
However it must be said that in the meantime…you have a lot of very frustrated cubase composers that need two fundamentally easier things to implement, which should have been done already a long time ago and sadly did not make it into C14:
improvements to the editor to make it more usable, particularly related to the groups feature, but there are numerous problems which have forced people to make web based EM editors and so forth to make up for the lousy editor in Cubase.
negative delay per articulation added.
Both of those two things could be done right now…way before Steinberg figures out how to combine the minds of cubase and dorico teams and come to agreement about how best to take expression maps forward in the future. please…we need negative delays already years ago and its costing us many hours of wasted time in our work… And the editor currently sucks, which also makes is very inefficient in our work and many times give up on even using expression maps.
Any expression map related changes sound very exciting. Are you looking at implementing compatibility with MIDI 2.0 Orchestral Articulation Profiles in a new expression maps system? To me that is one of the most promising of MIDI 2.0 in the potential to remove most of the manual configuration involved in making expression maps.
Some of the things that people want from Cubase expression maps are things that Dorico expression maps already do (eg per articulation delay). I think one of the main things people use the web EM editors for is to expand all the switch combinations. In Dorico that’s not needed because we have the ‘add-on switch’ mechanism. So I think there’s potential to bring some of Dorico’s benefits to Cubase.
