As someone who writes almost exclusively for the marching arts, I’m finding Dorico increasingly difficult to use for my workflow. What makes this especially frustrating is that at least one of these issues represents a regression, with functionality I relied on in earlier versions that no longer works. I wanted to share two significant pain points in hopes of getting some clarity or seeing them prioritized.
1. Routing individual instruments in a percussion kit to separate VSTs
As far as I can tell, there is no reliable way to route individual instruments within a percussion kit to specific VST endpoints. This is a regression; I was able to do this in earlier versions of Dorico, and losing it in Dorico 6 has significantly disrupted my workflow. When the top-level kit is assigned to a VST, the individual instruments become unselectable in Play mode. And when I leave the top-level kit unrouted and try to assign individual instruments manually, Dorico automatically re-routes the top-level kit, breaking the setup again.
2. No dedicated percussion sticking feature
The lyrics workaround for stickings is deeply frustrating for kit writing specifically. When entering lyrics on a multi-drum part (e.g., a quad/tenor line), the lyric popover advances only to the next note on the same drum, completely skipping notes on other drums in the kit. This makes entering stickings across a full quad part extremely tedious and error-prone.
Together, these two issues make Dorico feel underpowered for marching arts writing compared to alternatives. I’d love to know if I’m missing something, or whether these are on the roadmap.
