Notation of an Opera in Dorico?

Hi there,

I’m about to start working on an childrens Opera, and wonder if it makes sense to do this in Dorico.

At the moment, and since many years, I’m with Sibelius and have a fluent workflow with that. Yet, I’m very curious on Dorico, and would like to check it out and might change there at some point.

This opera will be one hour long, 16 musicians and 8 soloists. Romantic style, so no unusual notations.

Of course, I need cue notes. is this already possible, or when will it be?
Also, I wonder about the working speed of the program (since I read, Dorico can be slow).
I’m here on a PC with lots of RAM.

Thanks, and very curious for your input,
Stefan

Dorico doesn’t support cues or cue-sized notes at all at the moment, I’m afraid, though this is a high priority for us.

Pity!

Regarding speed I think you have to decide for yourself, those things can be very subjective. I know there are quite a few hardcore note entry masochists out there, but for me personally, Dorico becomes impossibly sluggish very soon, even on a well powered i7/16GB machine. I spent a minute making up a bogus 1800 measures, 16 instruments score in Finale and imported it into Dorico via MusicXML. You should download the demo and do a similar test.

I’m doing a similar thing…a musical play. Two Acts, over an hour long each act, with approx. 2-3mins acting / dialogue followed by a number. I’ve elected to ditch the Sibelius (5.1) and start to learn Dorico. I had about the first half hour of Act One done in Sibelius, and just learned about XML which I’m using to port it to Dorico…it’s not fast but it beats entering the whole thing from scratch. I just tried out ‘colour’ on notes and it works, so your ‘cues’ could be put in different colours although they would still be standard size. I’m of the view that Dorico in a couple of years will be on a par with Sibelius and that the handling of Flows and Parts will be superior and quicker, hence my decision to board the bus. I’m also hoping that as the program develops, intermediary things like colouring the cues will be able to be replaced simply with cues because it will be easy to see which bits need mending. I think for my needs, where I want sections of the dialogue in the actual score (in case an actor should forget lines etc.) I’ve found out today how easy this is by inserting blank pages and using the ‘Engrave’ mode to copy and paste from the Open Office doc that the script is written it.
Al

Thanks all!

Unfortunately, the missing cues alone will make this impossible to do in Dorico… The parts and score will be printed in B/W and I guess the orchestra musicians will expect cues to look like they always did…

Also the speed thing is not so encouraging.

Still, I’m really looking forward to the day Dorico is grown to full blossoming!

We’ve discovered a few specific areas of code that were causing very long scores and scores with many flows to be very slow to load and edit. We’ve been able to speed these up quite substantially (though every score is different - if you have a specific large score that is slow then please do attach here or send to us and we can test with it). These improvements will be in the next update.

Preparing the start of an opera as well and am deciding if I should start it in Sibelius 6.2 or Dorico. I finished a 30 minute piece for narrator and orchestra recently in Sibelius using NotePerformer to create the bounces, which, combined with my friend who narrated the text, had a very good end result. I am worried though about the bounce result in Dorico for the opera. How good will an orchestral bounce be with the Halion library? And how well will the score be played back when it comes to dynamics and articulations etc?

I don’t really know about these things…a few years out of the loop and computers and sound libraries seem to have gone on in leaps and bounds. Just checking some of this guy’s stuff is mind-blowing:

Though I guess you probably need a Hans Zimmer room full of computers (or at least sound libraries…and a fair bit of knowledge on how to get the best from them).

Where’s the best place on the internet to get up to speed on computer requirements and sound libraries and software, since I take it none of the pieces above would be playing back from a score…or would they?
Thanks, Al