When to use Cubase beyond Dorico?

Dorico
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I have been exploring Dorico scoring a bit, going to try to get more into using it for mock up now, and would like to hear from people, what very specific things do people feel, at this point in time, are better off handled in a DAW such as Cubase instead of Dorico?

it Seems many playback features in Dorico are designed more fore easily rendering the score in a nice format, but not so much for entirely replacing the task of using a DAW such as Cubase to produce a fully mocked up version of a score with all the midi subtleties, not to mention audio mixing capabilities…etc… But Dorico is quite capable, it seems, so I’m wondering what specific tasks are still preferred to do in Cubase instead of Dorico…in terms of realizing the best top quality mockups possible with modern sample libraries? And why?

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Well, I’d say, if you want to fix some things which distract you while listening to Dorico’s playback, you can do so within the app, and that’s great. A simple example that I encountered quite a lot: Shorten quarter notes of Big Band swing tunes.
If you want to build a mockup that emulates human playback and/or production sound in detail, you should not do this in Dorico, since you’ll like to have DAW-features like audio processing (insert fx), layering of samples, more sophisticated MIDI mass editing and more. My experience is that much gets lost if you hand the project over from Dorico to Cubase (MIDI seems to be the best option, but does not include any instrument setups or mixer settings), I recommend to do as few fixes in Dorico as possible (or just if you can fix it in the MIDI), finish up the piece/written notes and then start afresh doing the sound/mockup based on that. If you have to go back and forth, you’ll lose sync very soon, so that should be avoided at any cost.
Cubase and Dorico are both owned by Steinberg, but as a user I cannot see any functionality benefits of this at this time (hopefully this will change some time in the future)… you could do the same workflow with any other DAW as well, I think.

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Thanks for responding! I hope this thread will get a lot of great information about how and when to transfer to Cubase or any other thoughts about how and why Dorico users would still need to work with Cubase in some fashion while working on instrument mockups.

Some people seem to prefer to do initial composing in Cubase and then transfer to Dorico if and when they need a printed score. I, on the other hand, prefer to work with notes on staves while composing, which is part of why I would like to make Dorico my primary composing platform…and if possible, also good-enough mockup, but I can see easily that for many cases I may need to move it complete to Cubase to really humanize it…or some libraries simply require creative use of midi to get the true authentic sound out of the instrument, I suppose.

Regarding the audio side, one thing I am planning to do is to host my instrument in VePro7. I can still setup an endpoint to that, with a Playback template… The only difference is that the complete orchestra has to be loaded into VePro7, as opposed to if I host the instruments directly in Dorico, then I can load the instrument plugins one-by-one as I add them to the Dorico score… But when using a VePro based Playback Template…then theoretically I should be able to transfer the midi over to cubase, make sure the port/channel assignments are the same for each midi track…and point it at the same loaded VePro7 instance, and should be able to continue on from there without any more hassle.

Mixing in VePro7 also brings numerous advantages over Dorico’s mixer in case the project I’m working on is simple enough that a Dorico-only mockup will suffice. I haven’t done any serious mockups with Dorico yet, so at this point I’m just investigating things and looking forward to how and why other people are using both Dorico and Cubase together for any reason…

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VEP is definitely worth the investment. You won’t regret it. It works great with Dorico too, and you can save your endpoint configurations that include VEP for easy recall. You’ve got it right that you can use the same VEP projects with Cubase. For what I do, I find that Dorico expression maps are more useful than Cubase expression maps due to the note conditions and mutual exclusion groups. That said, the more articulations you want to use in Dorico, the more difficult it gets to render the playback just the way you want it. The resulting MIDI out of Dorico to your VST instrument is interpreted based on the notation. You never get to work directly with the MIDI like you do in Cubase. As with any tool, the more you work with Dorico the better results you will get, and I have faith in the Dorico team that they will continue to improve the playback intelligence and options of the program. I got into Dorico with V1 It wasn’t until V3 that I could even consider creating a mockup in Dorico. I really like your idea of composing in Dorico and using Cubase to capture a performance.

One feature I would love to see in Dorico is simply copying a set of notes from a staff in Dorico and pasting those notes as MIDI into the Cubase MIDI editor just as if you were copying MIDI notes from one track in Cubase to another.

Bottom line is that creating a satisfactory playback performance is going to take just as much effort (fine tuning) in Dorico as it will in Cubase…but I find composing in Dorico to be much more productive and interesting than composing with Cubase - there’s just something about seeing your notes in staves on a score that a MIDI editor can’t provide.

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I find that Dorico expression maps are more useful than Cubase expression maps due to the note conditions and mutual exclusion groups.

I agree, that is one reason I am heavily considering Dorico for even my mockups, they are ahead of everyone else in terms of articulation management, I feel. The DAW’s, including Cubase are lagging behind.

In addition to what you just mentioned, Dorico also added the init and add-on capabilities, with Cubase its very very cumbersome to setup mutually exclusive add-on groups, etc… A number of other things too.

pretty much none of the DAW’s articulation management systems properly forward CC and PitchBend events to other channels when channelizing is used to select each articulation note on different instrument channels. Dorico does that though! Everyone else has missed it, including Cubase.

You never get to work directly with the MIDI like you do in Cubase. As with any tool, the more you work with Dorico the better results you will get, and I have faith in the Dorico team that they will continue to improve the playback intelligence and options of the program

So please humor with a bit more…Dorico has a piano roll where I guess we can manually change the notes, at least a bit. We can change their duration and start time… we can manually add CC curves to our heart’s content it seems also. What sorts of things, specifically, do you find yourself doing in Cubase that you are unable to do in Dorico in terms of manually tweaking midi?

One feature I would love to see in Dorico is simply copying a set of notes from a staff in Dorico and pasting those notes as MIDI into the Cubase MIDI editor just as if you were copying MIDI notes from one track in Cubase to another.

Yes! And visa versa, I’d love to be able to use various midi tools I have, including DAW plugins, where are designed to play around with musical ideas, etc…and copy just a phrase from there into Dorico at a certain place on a staff. That’s not really directly related to mockup, but I see that as an area where composing in a DAW provides a lot of midi manipulation options while coming up with material.

Bottom line is that creating a satisfactory playback performance is going to take just as much effort (fine tuning) in Dorico as it will in Cubase…but I find composing in Dorico to be much more productive and interesting than composing with Cubase - there’s just something about seeing your notes in staves on a score that a MIDI editor can’t provide.

I don’t know about you, but I can barely think “musically” when I look at a pianoroll. When I see notes on staves, my music brain switches on. It was drilled into me at a young age to see chords, chord qualities, etc… and seeing actual visual accidentals helps to identify chromaticism, etc… so yea…I’m with you. I really want to use traditional notation while composing. That’s part of why I’m leaning towards Dorico as my primary composing platform…but…I’d really like to understand exactly if and when I may need to move things to Cubase in order to really nail the mockups.

And as I said, another area where DAW’s have a lot of cool features is in the area of using midi plugins and such to generate midi regions full of whatever…chords, patterns, phrases, etc… There are really many ways that this kind of stuff is useful, but as you said…if we could copy and paste short bits of midi between DAW’s and Dorico…then we could just use Dorico for the main mockup and use Cubase for experimentation, etc.

I actually have this sort of vision where I do quick sketching with Dorico and NotePerformer, then at some point if I like where its going, I switch over to using a VSL based Playback template…which SHOULD theoretically handle all the same playback techniques in the right new way, presuming I have setup my VSL playback template in the right way to handle all the playback techniques that are used by NotePeformer… And next step would be to manually work in the Dorico piano roll with CC curves, etc… in order to try to dial in the performance closer to good enough… And then finally, I guess it sounds like if I have something basically finished but I want to make the best possible mockup with many humanization elements added…and certain midi fine tuning that I can’t do in Dorico…that’s when I would export the midi to Cubase, continue using the VePro instance…and then tweak it as much as I want.

I could also see that it would basically need to be in Cubase in order to really be able to do things like generate stems and things like that…

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Great points - I’m with you in spirit. What I meant by my comment is that even when you are adjusting note lengths, velocities, and CC curves in the piano roll editor, you’re still a layer removed from the actual MIDI data because Dorico interprets your notation, adjustments, and instructions and then generates MIDI output. You can’t edit this output directly, only change the instructions.

1 Like
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Great points - I’m with you in spirit. What I meant by my comment is that even when you are adjusting note lengths, velocities, and CC curves in the piano roll editor, you’re still a layer removed from the actual MIDI data because Dorico interprets your notation, adjustments, and instructions and then generates MIDI output. You can’t edit this output directly, only change the instructions.

I don’t think I understand or agree with this. There aren’t that many things you can do with the midi data are there? I can’t think of anything you can’t do with the Play section. My understanding is also that you can alter the playback without affecting the notation which is what you’d want in most cases right?

I’m coming to the conclusion I’ll only need a DAW for true audio mixing which of course might still mean starting out with a midi export of your notation.

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You can indeed do a lot in Play mode. I agree it’s nearly completely sufficient. There are a few options from the Cubase MIDI tools I’d like to do in Dorico, such as create and apply groove quantize presets, and I’d like to be able to create mordents better. Further, I wish it were easier to apply some keyswitches like “repeat last note” used as a re-bow instruction for a solo string instrument. However, these nth-degree capabilities are minor inconveniences compared to the joy and efficiency of being able to write music as a score in Dorico. If I truly need live performance-grade playback, the best option remains to simply record playing MIDI in a DAW.

Anyway, I’ve had pretty good success exporting audio from Dorico tracks as .wav files and importing those into Cubase for final mixing.

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Aah ok I get what you’re saying.