In praise of Dorico's cueing and layout functionality

Dorico
1

I started this week with a seemingly unfeasible deadline: to fix 36 parts (and a percussion score) for a seven movement, 40 minute orchestral work (from an existing Dorico project, thank goodness).

The long and short of it is that between Sunday lunchtime and now, I’ve cued, formatted, tidied and PDFd what amounts to 811 A4 pages of parts and 60 pages of percussion score, and I’m positively proud of the output. That’s not to say it hasn’t been a slog - it has - and that’s not to say I’ve come out unscathed; in the few hours I’ve slept I’ve dreamt about setting properties for rest positions above/below cues.

It has been an absolute lifesaver to be able to cue up all the parts for an entire movement in one fell swoop (intentionally excluding playing techniques, slurs and dynamics), and Dorico really does get the layout right or nearly right a lot of the time.

The fact is that I would not have been able to put out something I was happy with in twice the amount of time in Product A, and the work would have been much more tedious.

Thank you.

P.S. Various feature requests to follow, probably next week…

2

Well done, Leo! And also, well done, Dorico! I’ve had similar experiences, although not quite as harrowing as what you described, and Dorico has always come through. I also remember my experiences with Product B and, especially with large projects including lots of lyrics, I remember the sword-of-Damocles feeling while performing many an operation, just waiting for the lyrics to disappear suddenly or for my hard-earned work on layout to get screwed up, sometimes not visibly until much later. I am so glad that those traumas are a thing of the past!

3

Definitely agree, Dorico’s cueing is a great feature! There was a period of time when I did a lot of orchestral work in Finale and the workflow of keeping one file for the score (condensed, no cues) and one for parts (not condensed, with cues) was a PITA. It also meant that all revisions after the rehearsals needed to be made in two separate places doubling the amount of work. This is definitely a huge time saver in Dorico!