I use Cubase 13 and Dorico 5 to study Mediterranean music and then make arrangements for my own use. For dance music in particular, the rhythm is often very fast and based on eighth notes. This is because dancers in this region of the world have “quick” and “slow” movements, which translate to 2 or 3 beats, respectively. A typical example would be 7/8, or (quick,quick,slow). Dorico 5 handles this nicely as 2+2+3/8.
Cubase 13 seems to handle this also, with a signature track of 7/8. I get a musical grid where there are 7 beats per measure and the measure intervals match the performance that I am studying. However, the tempo track has values that are half of the real tempo. In one particular performance, the pace is almost exactly 6 beats per second which translates to a tempo of 360 for 7/8. However, the values in the tempo track hover around 180, which would be the tempo for (3.5)/4.
I can deal with this, but I run into trouble when trying to export MIDI tracks from Cubase into a Dorico score, using the Cubase scoring editor and XML. If I import the XML into Dorico, I then get either quarter notes instead of eighth notes or I get eighth notes interspersed with an equal number of rests.
I presume that this is not a new problem for the user community. However, so far I have not seen an instructional video or manual that describes how to handle this problem. Can someone suggest the cleanest way to deal with this?
Cubase’s tempo values always refer to a quarter, that’s the reason why there’s this mismatch.
Is there a particular reason why you are using everything together? MIDI files, and the score editor and XMLs? Do you already have some material (scores) ready in Cubase and wish to migrate it to Dorico, or is there another reason?
You should ask this in the Dorico forum.
Look, I’m no expert on Western Common Practice music theory, but to me a signature of p/q has always meant “p beats per measure and a q-note gets one beat”. So, a signature of 3/4 has three quarter-notes per measure and a tempo of x means x quarter notes per minute. By the same reasoning, a signature of 7/8 means seven beats per measure and an eighth note gets one beat. That seems to be what Dorico does consistently.
Cubase, on the other hand seems to ignore the denominator in the signature, even if I specify it in a signature track. Instead, a quarter note is always one beat. Except when it doesn’t. If you take a MIDI track and create a score for that, I believe that this part of Cubase was adapted from code in Dorico. This is analogous to a spacecraft that once crashed because in one part a key parameter was in Imperial units and another part it was in metric. I’m just trying to be helpful.
As for why I move MIDI tracks from Cubase to instrument scores in Dorico, it is because I often study a performance by guessing what one instrument is doing, writing a MIDI track to imitate it, and mixing it into the original performance. If I have made no mistakes, the new track blends in. However, even small errors show up, just like if you had made a mistake while sitting in at a live performance. Once my MIDI track blends in, I know that I can move it over to Dorico to work on an arrangement.
Mediterranean music native here.
First of all, tempo unit in Western music depends on time signature and grouping. For simple time signatures (2/4, 4/4, 4/8…), it’s usually like you said, the denominator is the tempo beat unit. Compound time signatures are different. For example, 6/8 in Western music is actually [3+3]/8 and the tempo unit is a dotted quarter note.
Now, 7/8 and other common mediterranean signatures are different. They are irregular. As you pointed out, 7/8 is usually grouped as 2 + 2 + 3 or 3 + 2 + 2. We don’t actually feel 8 beats per measure, but rather three irregular beats or pulses. It’s not practical to express tempo in irregular units, so we choose either 1/8 or 1/4. Very often, all the eight notes are played and counted (e.g. 123 12 12), so 1/8 is indeed a good choice as the tempo unit. But sometimes percussions only play 1/4 notes on the pulses, in which case 1/4 may be a better choice for expressing tempo. Another common way to play and feel 7/8 is [1+[1]+1+1+[1] +1+[1]]/8 ([1] are rests and the accents are bolded). Again, 1/4 may be a better tempo unit here.
Another common one is 9/8. However, contrary to Western tradition, it’s not compound [3+3+3]/8, but also irregular like 7/8. It is often [2+2 +2+3]/8 and 1/8 is appropriate as a tempo unit. An interesting is [2+2+2+2+[1]]/8. Here, we feel 4 quarter note pulses followed by an eight note rest. There is also Greek Zeibekiko dance that uses its own 9/8 or 9/4 flavour. An endless story, really…
Does all this really matter in DAWs? Just use 1/4 as the tempo unit in Cubase. And even if you want to notate Mediterranean music for human performers, either 1/4=120 or one 1/8=240 will be understood by everyone. Or simply write some descriptive tempo.
Speaking of Dorico, I’ve just checked, and it also uses quarter note as the tempo unit by default, even if you input 3/8 as the time signature via Shift-M popover. But you can easily configure that to literally whatever, contrary to Cubase.
Thank you, Ikos. Yes, I was referring to the performance of La Comida, la Mañana by Emilio Villalba’s group Sephardica. This features a singer, a frame drum player, and a guitarist. Using a Doumbek MIDI instrument, I was able to blend in with the drummer when I used a 7-beat cycle of D–T-T-. So, as you said was common, this was a compound rhythm which Dorico accepted as 3+2+2/8. For tempo, I gave Dorico e = 360, which corresponds to q = 180.
I don’t dance myself, but I have been around a lot of Balkan dancers, who think of this rhythm as “slow,quick,quick”. In a dance piece, the dancers will be listening primarily to the drummer. The other instrumentalists are, as you said, free to elaborate this cycle as long as they all get together on the first beat of every cycle, or perhaps after two cycles. I believe that this is called polyrhythm in Western theory.
Once I was satisfied that I understood the tempo and the length of the rhythmic cycle, I added a MIDI piano track to follow the singer. Once I was sure that my piano track blended into the performance track, I wanted to move both the drum and piano tracks to Dorico so I could work on an arrangement that I could play. Since the drum track didn’t vary, it was easy to build it up quickly in Dorico. However, manually entering the piano track into Dorico by scanning an open Cubase MIDI edit window was tedious and I hoped for an improvement by using Cubase “score” tracks and exporting them as XML files.
You can drag and drop MIDI parts from Cubase to Dorico’s Play mode (at least in Dorico Pro, I don’t think the other versions have a Play tab).
We all have our own personal workflows. Through various accidents of history, I find myself, at almost 80 years of age, trying to understand traditional Mediterranean music. This is usually not written down in a musical score. I am very aware that my Western Common Practice background makes it very easy for me to make mistakes by inserting my cultural biases. To play any of this music, especially on different instruments, I need to write down a score. For that I use Dorico. However, I need to first listen to performances of traditional music by expert players and understand what they are playing. From that, I need to extract a skeleton score plus a knowledge of how particular ethnic performers have elaborated on the skeleton. I know that they teach how to do this in music school, but for this late-comer I find that Cubase helps me enormously. Not only does Cubase allow me to set up a high-precision tempo track, but it also allows me to make trial MIDI tracks and test them out by mixing them with the original performances.
Currently my workflow, of listening to a recorded performance and extracting a score that represents its musical skeleton, contains a bottleneck. I must take a “piano roll” MIDI track and extract from it a score. The score must mostly follow the rules of Western Common Practice, as does Dorico. Sadly, it is not just a case of needing to be able to hear the MIDI when playing the Dorico score. I really need to have eighth-notes in Dorico be eighth notes, not quarter notes.
Recent versions, at least, of Cubase have a score editor. You can select a MIDI event, open the score editor, and see what resembles a Dorico score. Unfortunately, for music whose true signature is 7/8 or 3+2+2/8, there is no way to designate this in Cubase. If you have a signature of 7/8 in the signature track then Cubase ignores the 8. You can’t enter 3.5/4 into Cubase. So the XML file produced by the Cubase Score Editor has artifacts, like wrong tempos, single measures becoming two, eighth-notes separated by eighth rests, etc.
I know that successful software systems like Cubase have “features” like this. Often the need for backward compatibility makes it hard to fix them. I am mostly looking for a workaround. So far, making fixes has been for me like pushing down on a waterbed. Meanwhile I will go back to doing the conversion manually.