Exporting MIDI from Cubase

Hi everyone.

I recently picked up Dorico Pro to work in tandem with Cubase (loving it so far). I’ve worked in Cubase as a composer for many years but my question is:

What’s the best protocol for exporting midi from Cubase to then bring in to Dorico? Should I heavily quantize and clean up midi in Cubase first?

I seem to be getting a lot of messy imports + signature and tempo information isn’t always brought over. Can any orchestrators out there lay out their protocol for working with Cubase in tandem with Dorico? I’d love to figure out what export options I need to do so I can start working on the music without the headache.

Professional Orchestrator Tim Davies in his blog entry http://www.timusic.net/debreved/extreme-australian-orchestration/ recommends quantizing in the DAW before moving to a notation program. Although his pre-Dorico video uses Finale for notation (and he may still), I expect you’ll find the tools in Dorico for cleaning up a quantized MIDI import now more flexible than those in Finale.

You might find it easier to import from Cubase as an XML file instead of MIDI. You could try a short example of both to see which suits you.

I don’t know which version of Cubase you have, but I was having issues with XLM and MIDI exporting to Dorico with version 10.5 (misunderstood or skipped bars, among others). With the 11, everything is beautiful.

On the question of quantizing before, this makes sense in the case of a traditional composition, but you lose the humanity of an interpretation in the case of a composition that wishes to keep the natural playing until playback. For my part, I ask Cubase to detect the tempo. The export keeps the tempo track and then you have some basic structure in Dorico, with the tempo changes. Tempo reflects human imprecision and leaves a clearer structure. But I’m only starting to do this in a current job, I haven’t pushed the experimentation very far yet. I don’t know if this will help you.