Dear Dorico development team,
for me - in addition to their engraving prowess - scorewriters have always been a great practising tool, it has been this way back in my old Sibelius days and now is with Dorico, whose powerful Play mode, mixer, piano roll editor and VST routing make it an absolute joy to use.
Still, there is something which I would love to see added:
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Global adjustment of the pitch that is sent to the VST instruments by semitones
This woud be very handy to practise singing to for example, Dorico would serve as a répétiteur in this case. Another use would be practising jazz licks in different keys on a solo instrument or evaluating the optimal key of a composition for a particular choir.
At the moment, this functionality can be emulated by selecting the whole score and shifting the pitch chromatically with Alt+Shift+up/down or by adjusting the pitch in the VST instruments themselves. Both these options do have their cons though: The first alters the score, which feels like a kind of blunt instrument for a mere playback (and export) purpose, and the second can be a little complicated depending on the VST instrument and the number of MIDI channels used - in HALion, the pitch can only be altered for a single channel at a time, not globally. A setting within Dorico itself would furthermore make the user independent from the actual interface of any VST plugin. -
Global adjustment of playback speed *
Don’t we already have this? In a way, yes: There is Fixed Tempo Mode, which can be adjusted (albeit not in a very precise way, I have to add) but intentionally ignores all tempo changes within the score, and then there is Follow Tempo Mode which follows all correctly indicated tempo changes, but cannot be altered in global speed - except by editing the written tempo indications in the score, which again feels rather awkward when looking at the described purpose, especially with Dorico’s otherwise extremely powerful playback functionality in mind. I did it this way back in Sibelius, I rarely do it now in Dorico, where I usually use Fixed Tempo Mode, but there may be situations in which I would like to include the tempo changes written in the score.
So, long story short: I would very much welcome a global speed and pitch adjustment similar to that which transcription-oriented playback applications like Transcribe! use, just that in this case it doesn’t necessarily include audio tracks, as Dorico does not yet have those. To avoid confusion for users who do not need such a feature, there could be some kind of visible Global Warp indication (or whatever it would be named in the end, I don’t know if Ableton has some kind of copyright on the particular term Warp for this). And it would also be great if these settings would also affect audio export, not only the playback from the software itself.
Thank you very much for considering!
Sebastian
P.S. Of course, the much requested Loop feature would be very much welcome as well for this use case, as would be an option for a count-in.
P.P.S. And as always, I do know about your huge backlog, which makes me feel kind of guilty for adding just another item to the already long list of FRs…
*P.P.P.S. As @Christian_R kindly pointed out, the speed adjustment has been requested before and noted by the development team, which I probably missed due to wrong search terms used. My bad.
