There’s actually now a thread that addresses some of this here:
Daniel asked for some suggestions for improvements to Play Mode based upon our using of the Piano Roll in other platforms (including Cubase) - here’s what I suggested (borrowing from Logic), which I’ll re-paste here:
Here are the things I use all the time in Logic Pro’s Piano Roll that I’d love to see in Dorico Pro (apologies if some of these features are already there and I just haven’t noticed!):
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Logic has robust quantization options in the Piano Roll I use all the time - directly selecting a group of notes in a give region I’m editing and then setting whether to round them to the nearest 16th notes, swing values, etc. and also the percentage of 100% I’d like to move my performance to retain the “human” feel of the original input (but with more quantized accuracy). From what I understand, Dorico has the option of retaining the originally performed MIDI, OR “resetting playback overrides” to have the notes start times line up exactly with timing notated in Write Mode (but nothing that retains the perfect notation, but which then allows you to finesse the playback separately via quantization, other than by manually moving things note by note). For example, it would be nice to be able to have Play Mode set to show just played durations (as is now possible), and then to select those notes and have access to menu-based, more tweakable quantization options a la Logic Pro (including things like different swing values, etc.) that ONLY affect the playback (not the notation) (right now if I invoke the Quantization menu after selecting notes this way they also affect the way they’re notated, as far as I can tell).
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Love the presence of the Velocity lane in Play Mode in Dorico (a great start). However, it would admittedly be EXTREMELY helpful if the actual notes displayed in Piano Roll were colored (as they are in Logic) according to their velocities (or to at least have the option to turn this on). For example, in Logic, very high-velocity notes are colored red, medium green, all the way down to purple. This allows one to look at a range of Piano Roll notes and immediately grasp what the velocities are. Logic also allows you to then select a range of actual notes and quickly raise their relative velocities up or down as a group, or set them all to the exact same velocity and then raise or lower them. Logic also has a separate Velocity Lane below this similar to Dorico’s, where you can further act upon the data. To this end, it would at the least be helpful to be able to grab a group of velocities in the actual Dorico velocity lane and with a key command set them all to the same velocity, and then raise or lower them as a group (right now it appears that all I can do is Draw new velocities across them with the Draw or Line tool, though this is certainly also helpful).
Just in general in Dorico’s Play Mode it feels like you could do more with the utility of color (much as you use it in Write Mode already in Dorico optionally to differentiate voices or show red notes out of range). To facilitate this, it would also (admittedly) be nice if there was much less “brightness” in Play Mode in general (understandable for more of a “notation on paper” metaphor but with Piano Roll I’ve often seen things against darker backgrounds when you have to stare at them for long periods of time and do “micro-tweaks”, etc.).
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Would be helpful to be able to select a note in the Play Mode’s vertical “piano keyboard” (up the left hand side) and have all notes of that position/pitch be selected, as I believe others have mentioned (since right now this of course does nothing).
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More quick “zoom” options in Play Mode. In Logic’s Project Window, for example, you can set a zoom level for a given track (by dragging the height to where you want it), and then have that zoom level automatically propagate to any other selected tracks whenever you hit “Z”. This sort of thing could be very useful for all of the Play Mode windows to zip in and out of them more quickly.
Just a few quick things -
Best and keep up the great work -
- D.D.