Play along with Dorico

Dorico
#1

I have a general question about Dorico Elements. Would someone please comment. I would like to do the following with Dorico Elements.
1, Import a MIDI file of my choice so it shows a channel for each instrument.
2, Assign instruments of my choice to each appropriate channel.
3, Bring up a jazz “Lead sheet” notation style.
4, Have the Piano channel of the MIDI file analyzed and the chords automatically displayed on the jazz type lead sheet.
5, Execute “Play” and have the cursor move through the lead sheet.
6, Be able to set up another channel with an instrument of my choice that responds to my MIDI keyboard.
7 And be able to “play along” in real time with the imported MIDI file using the lead sheet as a guide.

Have I really missed the point of Dorico or is what I describe possible?

Thanks so much

Fritzer

#2

Welcome to the forum, Fritzer.

  1. Sure.
  2. Yup.
  3. Do this before steps 1 and 2.
  4. Nope, Dorico can’t do this (even if you buy Pro)
  5. Yes.
  6. Sure.
  7. Definitely.

In three years of reading this forum (pretty much daily) I can’t say I’ve ever seen anyone request this “play along” usage, and I wouldn’t describe it as “the point of Dorico”, by any means, but it’s almost all possible. There are a variety of other products out there that can analyse the chords and turn them into text automatically, but at this point Dorico doesn’t have a feature that does that. (It’s part of the way there, in that if you select some notes you’ll get a read-out at the bottom of the window, but a) it’s limited to notes in a single voice and b) it can’t convert that read-out into text on the page.)

#3

Fritzer–

Leo has answered your ‘general question,’ beautifully and completely. I’d like to respond to something else in your posting, namely your final query “Have I really missed the point of Dorico.”

If your seven items really do express your understanding of what you thought “the point of Dorico” was, then, yes, I’m afraid that I believe you have indeed missed the primary point of the software. My understanding is that the primary point of the software is to provide elegant and well-designed music notation, comparable to what the top publishers put out. Everything else is peripheral to that. Not that there’s anything wrong with what you’re trying to do, and I, for one, wish Dorico had the possibility, as Notion does, of controlling tempo during playback on a note by note basis, live, on the fly. Which of course has nothing to do with notation. But I own Dorico, not Notion, and the notation capability that Dorico provides is much more important to me than that one playback-related function on my personal wish list. So, welcome to the club, and I hope your use of Dorico meets your needs in a way that is similar to the way it meets the needs of the hundreds of others who participate in this forum.

–L3B

#4

You may know that a 30-day demo version of the software is available, but I suggest that (if you can) you wait until the next update comes out (in a week or two, we hope) to get the latest version.

I also recommend that anyone who tries the demo use the one for Dorico Pro, since one can always open the Pro software as Elements if one wants to try that out, but the reverse is not possible.

#5

Thank you all for your comments they are most helpful. I am interested in the music “training” aspect and am amazed at the number of DAWs that do not offer that. My experience is that most users are not interested in such a capability and hence it does not appear. I often see music notation “editing” capability but not what I was looking for. Many thanks again.

Fritzer

#6

While most of the things you describe could be done in Dorico it just sounds if you were looking for a different kind of application. Different from any scoring application and different from any DAW.

You might have a look at “iReal Pro”, which works that way that you enter jazz lead sheet style chord symbols (or pull them from a large corpus of pre entered songs) and let the app generate a rhythm section track for these chords.

#7

Its probably dangerous for me to put my opinion in. But I wonder if the best tool for training is a music reader, like there are several for the iPad that read MIDI or Music XML with tools for learning/rehearsal. Dorico being the tool for creating more music for training.

#8

I think Dorico is a wonderful music trainer, but if that’s the only purpose of buying it, it’s rather luxurious :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
Anyway, I use it every day to learn my roles.

#9

Hi Fritzer - I use Dorico in a way similar to what you describe as part of my daily warmup routine. I have some long exercises for guitar and piano that take patterns through 12 keys. I find it helpful because I keep track of my tempi, and it also helps me stick with it through the end. For the record, I use Dorico for all the normal reasons too. I would also second the recommendation to look at iReal Pro, if you have not already.

Cheers! Chester