The overwhelming majority of big band writing never gets recorded because it’s obviously quite expensive, but at a big band date there is usually a printed score for the “ears in the booth” to keep track of what’s going on. The recording engineer will have all the Pro Tools tracks open and will sometimes mark approx rehearsal letters as you go, but I’ve done a lot of big band dates and no one ever has had the notated lines open in Pro Tools.
I’m not really seeing any benefit here. The musicians still need to read the music. Stating “Play 4x’s” in the part doesn’t seem any slower than telling a DAW to repeat something 4x’s.
Similar to the above, the vocal line still has to be notated for the vocalist. It has to be entered into the score anyway. I can just follow along in the score, I don’t need to hear it, and if I need to send a mockup, a VI voice is fine. Jazz vocal phrasing in notation and mockups in DAWs is strange anyway, because the actual vocalist is almost always going to phrase it differently.
I typically hate this. I’d much rather just have chord symbols that I’ve correctly typed in via keyboard (I never use Dorico’s “guess at chord symbols” input) than any sort of comping playback. Sure, if it’s a written piano part I want to hear it, but if it’s comping I usually don’t want any mockup pianist at all. Hire good people and let them do their thing.
For this I’m in agreement with you! I’d love to see more transcription capabilities within Dorico. It’s not much of a hinderance (for me personally) now though. I use Transcribe, which I can control with my MIDI foot pedals while it runs in the background and I input directly into Dorico. I’m on Win11 and I use Bome MIDI Translator to route the MIDI signal to multiple devices at once.
Agreed. This would be a nice feature. I don’t want Dorico to lose its focus of being the premier notation program, but built in transcription productivity features would be quite useful, if they could be as comprehensive as something like Transcribe. Ability to program keycommands to foot pedals, speed adjustment, fine pitch adjustment, octave adjustment (often essential for transcribing bass parts to get them out of the mud), and occasionally some rough pitch guesses are all features I regularly use while transcribing. I have 14 students in my Masters level improv class this semester, and they each have to do a transcription project where they transcribe 8 solos by a single artist, so that’s over 100 I’ll be checking. Most mistakes I can just catch visually, but tricky passages I’ll end up transcribing myself. I don’t have perfect pitch, but I’m pretty fast at it by this point.
Obviously we’ve gotten pretty far away from the initial Dorico vs Finale discussion. Now that D4 is out, there are very few aspects where Finale has an edge anymore. The ability to design instruments with any number of staff lines, any clef or transposition is certainly one. Staff Styles is another (esp with cutaway scores). Finale’s Chord Symbol Suffix Editor is a horrible bit of code that hasn’t been changed since around 2000, but it does allow you (quite clunkily) to create any suffix you might want with a flexibility Dorico doesn’t have. The way Finale allows you to modify Staff Labels on a system by system basis, and the way Finale offers control over what staves show system text (using Score Lists) is better, but that’s about it off the top of my head. Dorico is better or equal in just about every other aspect of notation and has many features that I’m sure Finale will never have.
