The music school I attend (Berklee) announced that they would be adding Dorico to the software bundle for the Film Scoring (now called “Screen Scoring”) program starting this fall. This got me excited, since I was already a Dorico user prior to this announcement. But knowing most of my Berklee colleagues are trained in Finale I can already tell there is going to be a learning curve especially those involving Dorico’s unique way of handling things like note durations, which leads me to this image bellow:
Let’s pretend you have a chain of tied whole notes like in the image, and later on you decide you want some dynamic changes in the middle so it’s more expressive. In other notation softwares you would simply click one of the whole notes and hit >. Not in Dorico. First you need to hit U to untie everything, then you insert the dynamic changes you want, then you tie them together again. You can’t just select a whole note in the middle then hit > or < or open the dynamics popover, everything gets selected all at once, because that is how Dorico handles note durations.
This was a simple example.
Let’s now imagine that you are composing in a large orchestral score (something that people in the Screen Scoring Major do a lot), on a compound time signature (something Dorico handles really well by the way) and you have a section full of those long durations with dynamic changes. You better be a decisive kind of composer, cause if you want to change anything in that section you must be ready to face Dorico nightmare.
You could argue “well that’s just how Dorico works and you have to manage wasting your time doing then undoing things just to change one single staff in the orchestral score in a very slow manner because that’s how it works”… Well… No! If something is unpractical there should be a change (or at least an addition) that overcomes this unpracticality. My idea was: Don’t change anything about how Dorico handles note durations, how about just adding an alt-click, or ctrl-click (or any combination of alt-click-shift-click) that selects THAT specific note in the middle of the tied note chain, then I can make whatever changes I want (simple or complicated) without having to do and redo stuff redundantly?
So yeah, this is the one Dorico quirk that I came across most regularly (in literally every project I worked on it) that is really frustrating. Are there any others you think are worth talking about/fixing, knowing that there is a large userbase about to join into the Dorico-Cubase ecosystem?
Thanks,
