Dorico Music in Quarantine

Ok, this is admittedly quite off-topic for a support forum, and if the mods think this should be deleted or moved to the Lounge I completely understand, but I would love to hear what others are writing with Dorico in quarantine. As none of us (probably) are performing anywhere live right now, it would be great to have a thread to hear what others are doing, whether solo, Acapella app, multitrack ensemble, etc. as long as it is written (and score and/or parts possibly posted and shared) with Dorico. With so many active composers and performers on this forum, I assume a lot of you are still finding ways to get new music out there. I’ve tried to make it a goal to write at least one new multitrack composition or arrangement a week (using Dorico of course) for the past month or so, so I would love to hear what everyone else is writing/performing. There are the usual social media outlets of course, but a Dorico-specific thread could be fun. As long as the mods think it’s ok, please share!

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I think it’s a great discussion topic!

I’m working on lots of new, miniature psalm settings for an upcoming psalter publication. Here’s one: Dropbox - Praise the Lord of Heaven (Ps 148)_TDS.pdf - Simplify your life

Switching to Dorico for hymnal work was literally the best professional decision of my life…

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Since Dan started us out with a religious piece (but 6/8+2/4, is eighth constant?), I’ll continue in that vein. I’ve loved this Take 6 arrangement of “A Quiet Place” for 30 years and finally got around to transcribing it to demonstrate some voicings to my arranging students a couple of weeks ago. Great arrangement that I transcribed using Dorico and multitracked on saxophones and bass (my bass playing sucks so no comments on it LOL). Anyway, not a completely terrible attempt at playing 6 voices myself in quarantine. Attached are a few pages in Dorico. I’m not 100% sure I got the voice doublings correct when there are only 4 pitches, but it’s gotta be pretty close.

Amazing original: Take 6 - A quiet place - YouTube
My attempt: Todd Bashore on Instagram: "I've always loved the Take 6 arrangement of "A Quiet Place" so I transcribed it Sunday to drop on some of my students at Temple yesterday. It seemed to be a natural fit for a quarantine multitrack version so here goes!"

Anyway, curious to hear what everyone else has been doing!
A Quiet Place pgs 2-4.zip (68.2 KB)

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Dear fellow Doricians,
As a locked down opera singer (and very bad pianist), I am in the process of copying as many Mélodies I can in these days where I still have time (spoiler : I am to be a dad in the next two weeks). So far, 60 from Fauré and a dozen from Debussy.
Here’s one I already shared on FB :

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At the very start of the lockdown, I made some YouTube videos of sections of pieces I’m working on. Vesper Psalms and Mass settings by Antonio Lotti.

Since then, I’ve been finishing off or tidying up loads of old projects. I’m now working on Lotti’s Madrigals, and another opera of his (having produced two in Dorico already).

And even found time for some composing of my own… :confused:

Best of luck, Marc!

GruĂź
Bertram

I’m making a new edition (score and parts) of Webern’s Passacaglia op. 1 which should appear on IMSLP in a couple days. Partly as a way of studying the piece in detail, partly because to this day, UE has never updated their original, less-than-optimally-readable 1922 edition. And the score is public domain now anyway.

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I’m doing a few thing, but the most interesting is a self-inflicted project. I went on Facebook and simply wrote that any FB friend in the following 24 hours could ask me to write a solo piece for them; a three-minute, encore-style piece. I excluded vocalists (for now). Within 24 hours I had 52 requests! The plate is wonderfully diverse, which is what I had dearly hoped for. It’s with a mixture of international recording artists, multiple award winners, seasoned professionals, university professors, university students at all three levels, music teachers, and a handful of amateur musicians as well. I have submissions from North America, Asia and Europe. Instruments vary from the violin to the cimbalom, including viol, natural horn, organetto, and strangely: only two pianos! This weekend, I will be half-done, and so far: two people have asked me about Dorico.

In addition to being assigned (Yes dear. How high? When can I come down?) a rather extensive home improvement project, I’ve been transcribing Mozart’s Oboe Concerto, K314 as an exercise to build my Dorico chops. I’m in the process of converting from Finale and I find that the overall quality of the work is quite superior to Finale but that my speed of note entry is still a little slower in Dorico but is improving rapidly with practice.

I spent a day or so working on expression maps for the BBCSO and then did a 2 minute test scoring a video with the library in Dorico. First time I’ve done something like this entirely in notation software instead of a DAW. The audio is just an export from Dorico and then I put them together in final cut pro.

If you write a solo alto saxophone piece let me know, I’d love to play it! I fit a lot of those categories :smiley: (Grades are due for my Master’s students tomorrow so I’ve been grading projects all day and am just getting caught up on this thread.)

I am creating a new set of orchestra materials for Massenet’s Werther based on the original Heugel and his manuscript.

While I used Dorico before mainly to reengrave old pieces of mine, during quarantine I actually tried something crazy: I started a 9min violin solo piece and composed it directly into Dorico - no problems here. I didn’t use any sketches on staff paper at all. I composed in open meter non—linearly. Insert mode was my helper.
I had a second flow for ideas/sketches.
Will now head off to a choir piece. But I am not sure, if I will do the same here although it was fun :wink:

Engraving the scores for YouTube videos of Renaissance madrigals to sing (or play) along to in lockdown has sharpened up my use of a number of Dorico features. Here’s some Monteverdi.

I’m working on a couple of things. A Metagrid / Dorico setup and, much more enjoyably, the Vocal Score of “The Merry Widow”. I’m playing it back through Pianoteq and Note Performer. Aside from a couple of very well-known items, I really don’t know the work at all - but I’m loving it. It sparkles, it’s so melodic and at times ridiculously OTT. A lot of work going on with the Time Track!

I have actually been working this whole time; our church has had weekly Masses from the get-go with live streaming. In that time I’ve had to compose a myriad of psalm settings to avoid royalty fees (we do not have onelicense and streaming counts as “broadcasting” so licensing can be quite expensive, even one-off). Just recently, I’ve started peeking at the treasure trove of old hymnals available on the CCWatershed website and reviving things that are particularly lovely for use by the choir next year (hopefully…).

Psalm:

Lovely old gem:

I also had a request from one of my choir members to resume making practice videos for the choir, particularly some of the chanted antiphons we ordinarily sing. Here’s an anglicized version of this week’s communion antiphon bung by yours truly (Fr. Weber, Easter 5, option i). Fr. Weber 812 • Easter V • Communion i - YouTube

Heck of a typo there in your last sentence Romanos, hehe, nice recording though!

Here’s a fun multitrack from a week ago, a 5/8 arrangement I wrote of the standard “Alone Together,” which seems appropriate for our times. I’ve never tried sharing a link this way through Google so curious if this works:

I even posted part of the beginning on the forum already when I think I discovered a bug while writing, although the final version was a bit different.

Ha! Indeed. Thanks autocorrect. Lol. I guess I’ll leave it.

I’ve been doing lots of little things, mostly in the nature of either cleaning up old projects or learning software and techniques that I never had time to dig into before. I’ve written a couple of jazz octet charts, but I don’t think this ensemble will get together for at least another 60 days. I found some combo arrangements I had done in 1999 in Overture 2 and decided I wanted to modernize 2 of them. I no longer had any paper version and I could not use the Overture software. I found a Good Samaritan who had Overture 2 through 5 installed on his computer. He was able to step my old files through several releases until he could produce XML. Importing into Dorico, the files were pretty jumbled, but the fragments were all there one way or another and I was able to piece both of the charts together and expand/improve them a bit.

Prior to this hiatus, several of my local friends have been running a monthly jam session. I had accumulated hundreds of lead sheets in all the major instrument transpositions. Probably the first 150 were done in Finale, and the first 50 or so of the Dorico ones were before I had settled on a template that had all the settings the way I wanted. So I have been going back to bring all of that up to date in Dorico with my template.

And at the same time, I am producing practice tracks to encourage people to continue practicing with “virtual jam sessions”. I produce those with Cubase, with which I have been becoming a lot more proficient. You can see these at the Urban Renewal Jazz blog

I have a workflow that works pretty well, starting with lead sheets in Dorico, sending XML to Band in a Box, then sending either WAV or MIDI (or combination of both plus some live recording) into Cubase. I can finish each tune in a couple of hours usually unless I end up digging into some more exotic feature of Cubase.

I have also been working with a technology called JamKazam that allows players to do real-time performing together at a distance, usually with manageable latency. That has enough promise that I expect I’ll continue to use that even after we are beyond COVID-19. I’ve had jam sessions with people all over the world. If you are thousands of miles apart, the latency gets to be a problem, but with the right setup (which is rather restrictive) you can get acceptable latency within 1000 miles typically.

Lovely stuff. How did you do notes held over the barline in Dorico? Hidden triplets?