I haven’t used Dorico for the past three years. Well, I tell a lie. I’ve used it for the odd piano transcription or vocal part, but I haven’t tried to do anything serious with it since I tried to link my Native Instruments and Dominus Choir library to it about three or four years ago. It was partially successful as seen here:
So what’s changed in three years? In the example above, I couldn’t run audio tracks (live soprano part) alongside the score I don’t think. I want to revise a musical that I recorded in Reason and started scoring in Dorico. I also want to start writing a new musical. After the announcement this week of NI going into possible receivership and Presonus Studio One (the DAW I’ve been using for the past eight years) being bought by Fender, I am conscious that going forward a safer bet might be proprietary hardware like the AKAI MPC XL. I have had various MCPs over the years and although they are really now a computer in a box, they don’t rely on Mr. Gates’s OS in order to run them. I have had the AKAI MPC Key 61 for the past three years which is a great writing / recording tool, but the screen is a tad small and is no match for my 64Gb Quiet PC setup.
I’d be interested in hearing about other users’ setups and what they do to reconcile the score against a finished audio realisation.
If you’re talking about version 5 and onwards (since May 2023), there have been literally hundreds of new features, productivity enhancements, extended capabilities and improvements, which you can read about in the Version History notes for 5.1 and 6.1; or the Scoring Notes reviews for each new release; or the Dorico Blog posts.
If you’re including version 4 in “what’s changed”, then that adds even more, much of it to do with playback.
I’d be very surprised if there aren’t several things that you would find useful, even if you still have desires that haven’t been realised yet.
First, there are many improvements over the past several iterations of Dorico. I started with 5 in Sept 2024 after Finale was clearly done, got 6 when it came out, and just between those two there are plenty of new things, including cutaway scores etc. Just look at the release notes, as well as the Scoring Notes site and you’ll likely be blown away.
Now to your main question: I realize my works with either or both NotePerformer and Pianoteq. I used to use Garritan Personal Orchestra 5 when I used Finale but then gravitated towards Noteperformer, although in some cases the strings for GPO5 were better so in those works, I used GPO5 rather than NP. I also sometimes use Reason as a VST rack inside Dorico, which works well. Pianoteq has moved me away from the Radical Pianos rack extension in Reason, since a Bösendorfer or Steinway D generally are better and I have more control over certain parameters (although Reason’s pianos are really good, TBH). That all conforms to what I’ve specified in my notated scores, and when NotePerformer’s strings fall short (as they sometimes do), I’ve got other options as mentioned (GPO 5 can work inside of Dorico, for example, although I’ve not needed to do that so far with my latest works). You can hear some examples on bandcamp or spotify if you’re interested (a few tequila shots in preparation might be prudent, though).
I’ll have a listen and get back to you. I don’t think you’ve misunderstood my question. Basically, I write band stuff (typical drums, keys, guitars, vocal stuff) and also orchestral stuff, including musicals. I don’t usually use any notation for the band stuff and haven’t done since jingle writing in the late 80s/90s. With the musicals and also an MA I did 20 years ago, I had to produce written scores as well as recordings for other musicians. I find it extremely time-consuming and a very ‘left-brain’ activity. It’s almost always the case that I’m ‘realising’ the score from what I’ve already written and recorded as the ‘audio’ stuff that is generated from scoring packages like Dorico (and Sibelius before it) is not very musical (IMHO). I wondered whether this had improved over the three or four years since delving into it (my version BTW is 3.5)
Thanks and glad I didn’t misunderstand your great question! DM me if you ever do take a listen; would be curious if you find the Noteperformer and other sounds to be suitable for what you’re doing!
