Hi all,
As I wrote in my previous post, I am very new to Dorico so in case I might have missed something obvious, please feel free to correct me.
However, after importing an orchestral mockup produced in Cubase over to Dorico as a MIDI file, I was surprised to see so many double accidentals and enharmonic “fixes” . Sure, it’s all correctly spelled from a music theory perspective, but from a performing musicians point of view, it quickly tends to get overly complicated and very confusing.
I read som threads about this hoping to find an easy way to disallow double accidentals for the sake of easier reading, but all threads related to this only seem to point to time consuming workarounds.
So my question is; is there any simple way of telling Dorico to skip double accidentals when importing MIDI files? Or is there some way to disable them after import?
If not, I’ll probably have to reconsider buying a full license after the 30-day demo period ends as it’s just too much of a hassle going through each and every instrument part of the orchestra to correct it manually.
Is it possible to fix this in Cubase, anotherwords so that a clean MIDI file is saved?
The Transpose dialog has an option to exclude double and triple sharps and flats. So you just “transpose” the piece to the same key it’s already in.
Hi notesetter and thanks for replying.
I’d rather not go into Cubase score editor at all because I find it exceptionally clunky. Besides, I believe for accidental changes to have effect in Dorico, I would have to export it as an XML file rather than a MIDI file which in this case is a problem as tempo changes and markers are crucial and won’t be included in the XML.
Thanks for replying benwiggy.
I see, well how does that work when the piece doesn’t have a particular key?
You can transpose by an interval, in this case a unison.
I tried your Transpose dialog suggestion, which seems to at least clean up double accidentals. However it doesn’t change the enharmonic equivalents (i.e. from E# to the more easily read F), nor does it seem to have any effect at all on transposing instruments such as for example Clarinet in Bb (provided that the “Transposing layout” box is ticked in Setup/Layout Options). Am I doing something wrong here?!
You can filter-select all notes by pitch to pick up the E#’s, then change them to F.
Thank you for the suggestion dankreider. I tried that but the problem is;
in the case of say, B# to C natural, after filtering and transposing by a half step, Dorico doesn’t get that the C replaces B# which means that if there is a C# before the altered C (which was a B# before) the C won’t have the required natural accidental. This makes the transpose operation pretty pointless because you still have to manually input a natural wherever those mismatches appear in the score. It may be ok for one or two instruments, but when you’re dealing with a full symphony score all this fiddling around gets time consuming.
No, sorry I wasn’t clear. Don’t transpose those filtered pitches. Simply respell them using Alt-minus and Alt-plus.
Thanks, although when Alt plus (Alt+) didn’t work I looked it up and it’s “Alt=” if you want to go upwards.
Still, the “Respell to avoid double and triple sharps and flats” in Write/Transpose dialog doesn’t work on transposing instruments. Any suggestions?
My god, this is a PITA! Why so many workarounds?!
Yeah same key on my keyboard. Sorry.
It’s not generally that much of a pain. You happened on a rare pain point but it’s not too hard to fix.
No worries. 
Well, I guess it depends on how you work. If you compose entirely in Dorico I can imagine this not being much of an issue. But if you happen to do the whole arrangement in a DAW prior to importing it as a MIDI file in Dorico - this evidently becomes a tedious procedure which leaves some things to be desired.
If you’re not using a key signature, then that comes down the nature of MIDI, which has no concept of enharmonics.
Might exporting as MusicXML give you a better result? (Hmm. I see you’ve mentioned that tempo changes aren’t in XML from Cubase? 
) I suppose you could do both: import the MIDI for the tempi, and then import the XML. It would go in a new flow, but you could then copy and paste the notes and delete the second flow.
Could you submit a sample? I’m kind of surprised that if there’s no key sig, you’d get any double sharps at all.
It’s not impossible for Dorico to produce double accidentals in that scenario. When you import MIDI, Dorico analyses the music to try to determine what key(s) it is in, and will spell the notes according to the keys it has determined.
@Carlster76, if your music is ostensibly tonal and could be expressed with standard key signatures, you might find creating appropriate key signatures at the right point in your music and then transposing it by a unison with the option to simplify the accidentals selected improves the enharmonic spelling, and after that point you can of course delete the key signature again, leaving the spelling intact.