Guitar TAB- when?

Dorico
1

I downloaded the 30 day demo version of Dorico yesterday. I must admit my initial reaction was “wow, this makes so much sense doing it this way”, and it does look and feel like it could be a really good programme.

But…is it me or is this programme only really usable by Classical Music musicians so far?

Let me explain- I have been a long term user of Sibelius, and I write guitar, mandolin bass, and generally plucked string arrangements. I have got to a point where, even if i don’t like the way Sibelius does something, at least I know how to do it and can get scores in pretty quickly. One of the things I like to do is input my guitar arrangements in TAB. This is one thing Sibelius does OK with. But there was a palpable sense of disappointment yesterday when I realised that any sort of TAB in Dorico seems to be non existent. I should have realised this when I was exploring the quick ensemble setting up procedure, and noticed that all the ensembles were basically orchestral sections.

Now, I am assuming I am not missing something here and the demo version is not missing stuff that is actually in the fully paid version? If not, then why is there not the ability to quickly set up say a Rock Band? Or a Big Band?

I realise Dorico is new, and I read the review in Sound on Sound where there were several raised eye brows on my part at things that weren’t implemented yet.

Does anyone know if and when features suitable for us non classical musicians are going to be made available?

My reason for wanting to jump ship, as well as not liking the way Sibelius does some things, is that Avid have moved to a subscription based system of paying for your software, which seems mightily expensive and unfair. I felt it was about time I investigated what else was out there.

Robbie

2

Hi Robbie

It’s not designed to be an ‘us and them’ classical / pop jazz divide, but we had to work on all the ‘common’ stuff first, and it then does look a bit classical sometimes - because classical music tends to use all the common stuff.

Chord symbols are coming in the next version, although not yet guitar frames (although see this interesting workaround if they are important too: Chords and Scale Diagrams in macOS).

Guitar tab is also unfortunately not in the next update, sorry.

3

OK, I’ve now unistalled it. Its a shame, because I loved what I saw, but for me this is unusable without the TAB. I will come back when you release a fully functioning piece of software.

Robbie

4

Why uninstall it when you get free updates which eventually will include what you need? Or do you need the disk space?

5

Well it is the demo version. To be honest, I am not going to put in a great deal of time to learn to use a piece of software that doesn’t do what I want it to do. I will reassess Dorico when it has the functionality that I need.

Rob