Haven’t seen very much posted recently (since the announcement of Finale’s end), so I thought I’d ask where we’re at with marching percussion in Dorico.
I eagerly purchased Dorico after attending a session at my state Music Educators’ conference last week. I’ve dabbled with the free trial but never really decided to make the jump from Sibelius (which is all but abandoned) to Dorico rather than MuseScore (which is free, but clunky; even in its most recent iteration) until now. I was VERY disappointed to find that Dorico has ZERO built-in options for even a basic-sounding marching drumline. The top recommendations seem to be…
- Purchase an 18-year-old Drumline (VDL by Tapspace) for an additional $200 on top of the existing cost of Dorico. That’s nearly double what I paid for the entire Noteperformer library, and is $200 more than what I paid for Sibelius’ built-in marching percussion or MuseScore’s drumline library.
-OR-
- Fiddle with manually creating an entire percussion map from the ground up for one’s desired drumline sound library. The latest MuseSounds drumline library for MuseScore 4 isn’t compatible; Musescore 3’s Muse Drumline requires an extensive amount of setup. Other cheap options require additional software that Dorico doesn’t seem to accommodate. I managed to find an inexpensive and quite good-sounding drumline library that works for a small-school sound (Spitfire Originals Drumline), but that also requires a lot of tinkering that further delays the process of actually writing and arranging music.
So I am just wondering…what plans are there to integrate marching percussion? The complete lack of Drumline features is extremely disappointing and makes it very hard to recommend Dorico or even be satisfied with my own purchase of it to anyone in the band world. I almost understand the “Drumlines aren’t common in Europe” logic - except Sibelius was also European-based and featured multiple marching band templates and excellent built-in drumline sounds in Sibelius Sounds. It seems Dorico is aiming to take the ‘crown’ of Finale (including actively advertising to American Music Educators at conferences) and presumably also be considered a “premium” alternative to MuseScore (free and simple with one heck of a free sound library), and both accommodate marching percussion perfectly fine with templates and sound presets. Most of the responses to these questions don’t seem to give a clear answer that Dorico will truly be improving this aspect.
I sincerely hope that Dorico plans to catch up in this area. In almost every other area it is superior to its predecessors and could certainly be the end-all-be-all for the future, but any band director that has anything to do with a marching band (which is most of the United States and then some) needs drumline integration to make using Dorico practical.