Live MIDI input – how to optimise it?

Dorico
1

Dear fellow Doricans!

I am dedicating some time before the summer to try to establish a good workflow for live input of MIDI into Dorico. I haven’t really had a serious shot at this before. Usually I make a sketch in my primary DAW which is Nuendo, and then export the MIDI to Dorico when it’s time to write scores for the musicians, and then continue on with editing and engraving in Dorico once all the notes are imported in place. This is a quite natural workflow for most projects of mine, but for all-orchestral music (with no electronic elements that would reside in Nuendo), I want to actually try to see if I can become friends with using Dorico all the way from sketch to full score, skipping Nuendo entirely.

The way my brain works, I need to have a quick and responsive workflow when I’m in the “zone” and getting my ideas down – otherwise I might lose the momentum. :smiley:

The first thing I tried is to change my Playback Template from my usual NotePerformer to Iconica Sketch + Halion Sonic, as NotePerformer (wonderful as it is) simply has too much latency to feel responsive enough for live input. I still find that when inputting 16th notes, I have to add a 90 millisecond MIDI input latency compensation. Then it «gets» my playing right, most of the time. It still feels a BIT slugglish, compared to the snappy responsiveness I’m used to from Cubendo, but I can probably live with it.

As another experiment, I tested if there was any way to live input notes when in PLAY mode, as this would be the closest to my regular workflow in Nuendo. I found that it actually worked as long as I used the pencil to create an event on a track, activated the bottom panel to view the empty part, then placed the playhead back in the main window, and then hit Cmd+R. I get the feeling that I’m not really supposed to use Play mode for recording live input, and that I have somehow «cheated» to get it to work this way… But it would be great if this was properly implemented, so that the Play mode could really be used as an alternative way to record the parts themselves – for those of us who are more used to looking at DAW timelines than at scores. :smiley: It’s an interesting thought, at least!

Any insight on what kinds of workflows you use to get as smooth as possible live input setup, would be really interesting! :slight_smile: Do any of you tend to prefer more “lightweight” libraries like the Halion Sonic stuff to get a smoother live input performance with less latency problems, and then switch to heavier stuff like NotePerformer once you’re done with note input? Or am I in a minority here to even attempt working with live input at all? :smiley:

I’m on Dorico Pro 6 on a Mac Studio M2 Max (2023) and an iMac M1 (2021).

2

By all means try playing into Dorico (though I would use Write mode rather than Play mode for this), but I think ultimately you may find entering notes in your DAW and exporting to Dorico will be a smoother workflow for you, since you are already familiar with that approach.

3

Thanks for your input!

Yes, continuing as before to write the sketches in my DAW might be the end outcome – however, I want spend some time to find out if I can get comfortable doing this completely inside Dorico, as there certainly are advantages of staying in the same software for the whole process. It becomes a much more flexible way of working since the work is not divided so much into a “composing stage” and a “notation stage”.

So I am still curious if anyone is successfully working with live MIDI input in Dorico this way? :slight_smile: