I’m a 30 year veteran of Finale on my day 3 of Dorico, which I am approaching as a whole new program, and I don’t need to continue my Finale ways in Dorico. I can already see that Dorico is a totally different animal.
I will be inputting all notes with a MIDI keyboard. For note entry, I now understand the distinction between the original, “specify pitch after duration” and the updated, Finale Speedy Entry style “specify pitch before duration” and how to switch between them. There must have been a reason why Dorico was first originally created only with “specify pitch after duration”, although it’s great that “specify pitch before duration” was added. I can see where both ways of note entry would be useful.
But before I develop any bad habits, would the experts here and people whose income depends on how quickly they can generate a perfect page answer my question: For the quickest possible eventual workflow, am I better off learning Dorico with most of my note entry with the original “specify pitch after duration” or “specify pitch before duration”?
@FredGUnn made a great point somewhere recently that if you’re “composing” then pitch before duration might be better as it allows you to experiment a bit more without inputting notes, whereas if you’re just typesetting, pitch after duration might be more helpful.
I’d agree with the assessment that if you need to ‘noodle’ on the keyboard between entering notes, then using Pitch First allows that easily.
But if you’re entering a run of sixteenth notes, then (unless I’m mistaken) you’ have to change the pitch and press the duration for each one, whereas using Pitch After, you just set the duration once and play the notes.
The beauty of Dorico’s implementation is that you can switch between the two modes just by pressing K, so you’re not confined to learning one or the other.
Most of what I do is copying existing manuscripts or old prints into new scores, and I use Pitch After. (In fact, I always used SimpleEntry in Finale, too.)
It took me a couple of days on dorico to realise that there were two methods to notating. For finale i generally use the mouse to click on the staff for note entry, so after noodling in dorico a bit, ive come to realise that duration before pitch works best for me. I select the note duration then click away on the staff. In dorico, i just need to position the note horizontally on each staff using the caret position (the orange ruler) to skip the rests. To each his own. The best thing i found since being “forced” to dorico is that the (sound) output is far better than what i could achieve in finale, and setting up was much easier as well with the right playback templates
I appreciate your intentions in working thoughtfully, and I realize that we long(-er)-time Dorico users have been harping about this issue of habits here in the forum these last ten day. But from my perspective, that needs a bit of fine tuning.
Doing things like lots of manual dragging rather than dialing in engraving settings are the kinds of Finale-rooted habits that are discouraged — in part because they ultimately cost the user time rather than save it. (There are other reasons.)
But I wouldn’t consider either note-input method to be a potentially bad habit to form then have to break down the road.
In fact (and echoing @benwiggy), taking advantage of the ability to seamlessly switch modes in Dorico simply by typing K to meet the needs of the musical moment may itself be the best habit to build. After all, each is more efficient for certain musical tasks in relation to our individual computer and peripherals set-ups and usage.
And learning to switch modes flexibly is akin to instrument doubling. It’s readily doable, and though it entails different specific finger actions/sequencing, all of the fundamental principles remain the same.
Right, the beauty of Dorico is that both input methods work equally well and easily.
And the ability to customize your Keystrokes very easily means you’ll be working very intuitively and quickly before you know. I integrate a StreamDeck and have done so for a few years. Check out Scoring Notes/Notation Central for more information on templates that can get you up and running. Then, you can customize even more to your workflow needs.
Speaking from experience after 20+ years of Sibelius use.