I just experimented with this. It turns out that if you program one of your pedals (left one in my case) to “Start Note Input”, note input will be activated when you press down and deactivated when you release. The only problem is that when you press down again, note entry will start on the note you entered last. Maybe not always desired.
I hope Dorico adds this feature. I need to be able to find the correct note or chord on the keyboard first and then press the duration to enter the note/chord. Dorico’s way is really slowing me down. It would be simple to add as an option and with all the people migrating from Finale it would be greatly appreciated.
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The feature now exists: Preferences > Note Input > Pitch and Duration.
You can switch between “Simple” and “Speedy” modes by pressing K.
Yes it can, as ‘benwiggy’ also points out.
Using the ‘K’ key switches between the two modes. Very handy at different points in your work.
‘Pitch before Duration’ can be so easy to use in Dorico, once you get used to it, and perhaps fix up some Notation preferences and other preferences.
I came from years of Sibelius using ‘Pitch before Duration’, and now I honestly find that the Dorico implementation of it is even better, and it’s faster to edit any changes ‘as you go’ when composing because of so many ways to change note durations, copying sections of music, composing the same rythmic parts on more than one staff at the same time, etc. etc.
I use a MIDI keyboard and have set up StreamDeck to my way of ‘thinking’ and the important key commands I need.
Look at the ScoringNotes website and their NotationCentral for more information. In fact, ScoringNotes should be a major source of help.
It would be very helpful for pitch-before-duration (esp. for Finale switchers) if dots (etc. accidentals, ties, etc. – everything from Finale) were applied to the just-entered note. Anything that can allow a faster transition from Speedy Entry (like allowing for up/down step to be single-key commands) will help us coming from Finale. I’m willing to spend a lot of time learning the other aspects of Dorico, but losing decades of muscle memory for the most common task of entering notes is something that will be difficult to justify.
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Welcome.
I don’t know if these preferences do what you want …?
(personally I do duration and all the other stuff before pitch, so I’ve never experimented with this)
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Huge help! Thanks Janus!
I think that one of my fundamental misunderstandings, coming from Finale, still is between what changes the cursor position and what changes the active note. It doesn’t seem that there is a concept of a key that raises the cursor position up a step or down a step: what seemed to be the correct command, “Raise pitch by Step” is in “Note Editing” and not “Note Input” for a reason – it doesn’t affect the (vertical) cursor. So the most typical way of working with keyboard will appear to be using “ABCDEFG” rather than up/down – for working w/ medieval and Renaissance music (where perhaps 90% of all melodic intervals are seconds or thirds) it’ll be a bit slower, but presumably faster for people working with lots of arpeggios, etc. (and at least all of ABCDEFG are reachable with the same hand). More tutorials on moving from non-MIDI Speedy Entry to Dorico would be really helpful if anyone at Steinberg is following. THANKS!
I’ve had a few friends also complain about not being able to use the arrow up/down keys, but I’ve also come across quite a few situations where it’s actually nice to jump between instruments so quickly when filling out chords, etc. Perhaps a compromise would be the Dorico team adding a toggle option (similar to the pitch before duration button) that allows a “use arrow keys for pitch selection”, or maybe even a sub option when using pitch before duration. The arrow keys are usable in drum instruments so I’m curious if it would be hard to implement. (As a side note, I think it would be a nice quality of life update to add a gray/shadow note near the entry point showing which duration is actually selected - maybe just reusing the small note on the bottom left and adding stems to it!)
The up and down arrows actually changing the note to a different one is a UI decision made in older notation programs that is really strange when you think about it. Imagine if, when typing a post in this forum, you hit the up arrow intending to go up to the line above to change something you wrote, and instead it changed the letter that happened to be at the cursor to a different letter. But, that’s basically what the up and down arrow behaviour in other notation programs is like.
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instead it changed the letter that happened to be at the cursor to a different letter
Yes and no. Notes are clearly up-and-down things. Letters in an alphabet are not.
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As for myself, after a couple of years of using Dorico (having switched from Finale, which I’ve been using on and off since around 1990), Dorico is a joy to use … from the editing stage onwards: manipulating music, page layout and casting off, playback. (Rebarring music, for example, is so straightforward; and no more of that “the bar is full, what should we do now” silliness.)
But, the actual process of the initial note input itself – there I find Finale was better: If you’re entering notes with the mouse, with Finale you could ignore the mouse’s horizontal position. If you’re typing notes in with the keyboard, you could use the arrow keys and Enter. If you try to use Dorico’s on-screen keyboard, it’s buggy (at least on Windows: notes get stuck like an old piano). If you’re playing music in with a midi keyboard, Finale had hyperscribe.
But I’m sure that with future updates all these things will get better, they’re not fundamental to the software itself, just small quality of life things.
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Have you started on thread on this? I don’t think I’ve seen other reports, but I might have missed them. Certainly on Mac it works fine, and there are very few bugs that affect only one platform – (a couple of interface ones perhaps.)
Yes, sure:
and, more recently, I chimed in on this thread:
I stand corrected!
Anyway: the development team will sort it out.
I have to say that using a MIDI keyboard is far and away the quickest method. I have an Akai LPK25, which was about £30, that I can take with my laptop, and it works perfectly.
I have a 5-octave KORG attached to the computer sitting in front of me. If I were transcribing an existing piece, I would certainly use it for note entry.
However, when composing, it’s being used for messing around prior to note entry, so it’s not available. For that, the on-screen keyboard is best for me (because like most of us, I think in terms of notes on a keyboard rather than A B C).
That’s the main reason people use Pitch Before Duration entry (a la Speedy), so that you can ‘noodle’ on the keyboard without any notes going in – and then you press the duration key when you want to enter the note you’ve just played.
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I’ll try it…
Hello Daniel, with the massive migration of professional Finale users, it would be great if Dorico would reconsider making note entry somehow similar to speedy entry in Finale. Not only would it be a great way to make them adopt they new software more easily, but it would improve massively the speed of note input in Dorico. Right now no method is nearly as fast as Finale’s speedy entry, having instantly access to 5 octaves directly on the keyboard to enter notes almost as fast as one can play them. It shouldn’t be impossible to have a mapping of the keyboard that allows for this.
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Check out the Pitch Before Duration section to see how it relates to your desired workflow: