Thanks, Rob!
Thanks, Rob!
+1
Thanks, Rob, this looks great - I have often looked for helpful online materials on ear training and music theory but most are too elementary to be useful to those of us who already have significant musical experience and reasonable skill but lack training of a more academic sort.
Beethoven did. But then his idea of composition was pretty much:
I I I I | V V V V | I I I I | V V V V |
I IV | I IV | V V V V | V V V V |
I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV | I IV I IV |
V V | V V | V V | V V |
I | I | I | I | Oooooooooooooooooone.
So I’m not sure anybody needs to hear that on playback.
That’s not true. Beethoven is much more complex.
Well, Beethoven did end his 8th symphony with more than 50 bars of the tonic chord, but that was MEANT to be a joke - he said so himself.
But if the previous post was meant as a joke, it didn’t work for me. Watching a jazz guitarist trying to sightread the chords for the Grosse Fuge might be more fun…
I suppose the reason for my question was to get a feel for how few users (of Dorico) do (have to) employ an Edit-Listen-Edit-Listen-Edit-Listen cycle.
Otherwise more folk than apparently did would have experienced this?
I’m quite happy to be in a minority 
.
There are a variety of reasons to Edit-Listen.
Some may have to do with deciding between what notes to write period, some with what notes to write across a broad orchestral spectrum, and some with deciding what combinations of instruments are best employed to achieve the desired effect. For, me sometimes it is even deciding what effect among several options I want to achieve. If I play around with my concepts they become stronger, more developed concepts. Sometimes by doing this I end up going an unexpected direction, all because of experimentation.
If many are able to compose straight out their head, more power to them. I respect them. Everyone does not share their skills. Am I going to be Beethoven redivivus? No. But I want to do what I do to the best of my (finite) capabilities.
This is EXACTLY how I try to work on most projects. A few years ago (not that long ago actually) a college professor I know was advising all his students that with Finale, they should always set every instrument to piano so they could “hear the music” properly. I think that advice might have been justified in 2000. But I expect playback to be far more realistic these days.
There certainly are some techniques that the user needs to employ to help the music be easily heard; e.g. setting the stereo field properly, and maybe using a little compression to bring out inner voices. But I cannot conceive of doing an orchestration these days without realistic-sounding instruments. There are very few occasions where I need to produce a project that sounds 100% realistic (although others do have such projects, I’m sure). But I need the playback to be realistic enough to give me confidence with I am writing will sound right when played by real musicians.
My goal these days is charts that sound good the first time the band reads it, don’t waste any rehearsal time, and don’t need any revisions after the first reading. I can get pretty close to this goal with the current technology. There is still a lot of room for improvement in Dorico’s playback, but it is good enough for me to work effectively. (And I haven’t tried DP yet.)
P.S. My post about Beethoven was mostly a joke, although I consider everything between JS Bach and Tchaikovsky to be musical dark ages. My idea of torture would be to be locked in an elevator with nothing but Mozart, Vivaldi and the BeeGees. Just my opinion, of course. A lot of people like the BeeGees.
I’ve used this app a lot for ear training:
What’s wrong with the BeeGees?!
Back to the original topic, appreciation to Daniel and the team: this bug has finally been squashed in 2.2.10 