I’ve been using Dorico since year one and love it. But I’m still kinda slow.
Where should I focus my learning efforts? What has helped you become more productive?
I usually create and orchestrate hymn or song arrangements for church orchestra + team. I frequently begin with a photo score scan of a hymn or lead sheet to get the initial melody and song form into the project, but I spend a lot of time cleaning up, getting all of the song sections, chord symbols correct, etc.
I would love suggestions:
Best practices for creating, storing, naming and importing templates?
Best practices for storing and applying saved defaults.
Best practices for creating an initial empty score with all sections, proper meters, key sigs, barlines, repeats, rehearsal marks, etc.
Does your order of steps matter?
Song map decisions? (When to use complex repeat instructions as opposed to playing straight through)
Online lessons been most helpful to you?
I’ve watched most of the Dorico tutorials, and they are excellent, but I think a structured course for intermediate users would help me fill in skills I may have missed.
If you could take a moment to post one short suggestion, that would be amazing!
Putting these two together: I wouldn’t add all the “barline furniture” before the notation. I’d do it as I went along. You don’t even have to leave Note Entry mode to do Shift K, Shift M, shift R, etc.
And the danger of actually putting things one bar off, and then having to re-do it anyway…
I’d say the single most important thing for productivity is key shortcuts. Learn the factory shortcuts; add your own.
For me, adding shortcuts to “Duplicate to Staff Above/Below” was a massive timesaver.
Aside from memorizing/creating shortcuts and creating scripts, the best productivity suggestion I can think of: get a stream deck, the larger the better. Then get Notation Express for your Stream Deck.
Create a custom Stream Deck profile with (1) only the buttons you will actually use from Notation Express and (2) custom shortcuts you’ve created.
Don’t think of your Stream Deck profile as finished. Change it as needed, adding and subtracting to it.
One idea for temp Stream Deck buttons: set up buttons for keyboard shortcuts that you would like to memorize. Label them with the name of the button and the keyboard command. After a while you will use start to regularly use the keyboard command and can delete the no-longer-needed Stream Deck button.
Consider also, Stream Deck Mobile. You can use an existing iPad or tablet (even a phone but I think that’s only six buttons). You can pick up a refurbished iPad cheap!
What is also very handy is to work with an extra touchscreen monitor and Dorico’s remote API. You can communicate via web socket protocol which also runs locally without a webserver. I’m running a HTML/JavaScript file that I just open from local filesystem in a browser.
This way you can have your own custom dialogs for Dorico.
