Dorico - what quality can I expect for a midi mock up ?

Dorico
1

Hi ,

I was wondering what sort of quality can I produce as a midi mock up in Dorico 3 for classical music using libraries like Orchestral tools.
Would it be significantly better than Sibelius note performer?
Can it produce something equivalent to Cubase?

Thank you

2

Since you can tweak each note (it’s timing, length, velocity, volume) - seperated from notation - you can get pretty close to cubase quality (just lacking things like fx, inserts in mixer, surround etc.).

3

dorico has fx.

4

It’s just a lot fiddlier than taking it to a DAW. The biggest thing for me is that there is no way to subgroup stems for effects or mixing.

5

You can get broadcast quality, and do it about twice as fast as taking it back and forth to a DAW - at least for me. True that there is at the moment only a single send active. I don’t notice it that much as I’ve been using my libraries ability to share FX, or send effected sections of a part to a different midi channel.

6

Fortunately, Dorico separates the notation from the MIDI (Notator on the Atari also did this, Sibelius was a disaster in this area), and the new MIDI editor gives you many ways to achieve a realistic performance (depending on your sample libraries), but I find I still have to export the MIDI to my DAW as Dorico’s MIDI editor is fairly basic (this is not a criticism), to really fiddle around to get the effect I need. So for me, printing the score and getting an audio file of the performance are still two different things and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.
The recently updated Staff Pad might interest you, but this is a Dorico forum so you’ll have to find the link yourself.

7

NotePerformer is also available for Dorico (just one or two articulations like gliss. are not yet fully implemented) and I find it very nice for full orchestra when you want a lot of punch and rhythmic drive even if it doesn’t quite – almost inevitably as it is largely model driven – have the individual instrument accuracy of the top sample libraries. I’ve always hated the idea of taking a work back to a DAW and already with Dorico, it’s really not necessary for the most part esp., as shr23 says, you’ve got the essential fx’s built into the software.