Funny you mention Ableton because I follow Guy Michelmore and anecdotally he’s using and teaching himself Ableton more and more and up until now has always been a Cubase user.
All the recording studios I’ve ever been in except 1 have run Pro Tools, and that includes all the major NYC studios, and many NJ, Philly, Toronto, Detroit, NC, etc. studios as well. Pro Tools certainly has a monopoly on the recording studio market.
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Hi - where does this feeling of ‘more and more’ come from I wonder…
I’m a subscriber of Guy’s too and like his channel content a lot. I saw, and you’ll know, that he clearly states in his recent orchestration video tutorial inside Ableton Live, that this is NOT any permanent move to a different DAW.! He explains how he’s worked through moving between other DAW’s from Cubase, to Logic and Ableton - which he’s done so that viewers thinking of making any sort of shift themselves, might learn some tips and tricks.
Which could also be seen as a business decision to try and widen the reach into other potential purchasers of his educational courses. And to help try and increase his YT channel audience/subscribers too of course.!
I see he’s done that one Ableton video so far; within a few days being posted, he’s back inside Cubase running a 5 part Christmas composition tutorial.
His positive personality and enthusiasm he brings to all his content, is very appealing.!
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Well, this thread has certainly taken me on an adventure. I guess it was always going to happen.
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That person is me. Relax @ebrooks I don’t threaten. I only said there was no reason. I will upgrade to D40 (if I’m still alive) I’m with Dorico from D2 and I just love it. The only thing I meant is that there are many different wishes and interests because everyone uses the software differently and in my opinion that was somewhat underexposed in this discussion.
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I clearly missed that but it does make sense I suppose that he’d use several different DAWs as a way of appealing to as many composers as possible.
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Don’t let the algorithm trick you though; it is a self-feeding cycle. I see TONS of StudioOne content, for example, and very little of the rest. If I were to base my assessment off of what YT serves me, I would say the order of popularity is Logic, Studio One, and then Cubase, with ProTools and Albleton & Reaper floating in the distance. There are lots of people who reference Pro Tools, and say they use it, but then do their tutorials in their DAW of choice (which is often NOT pro tools).
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I wonder if this will hold up in the long term, especially as the tight integration with physical hardware diminishes.
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Fair enough. I didn’t buy into Dorico because of its engraving but because it was part of the Steinberg system. Yet I’ve found something worthwhile in every upgrade - even the one that was an actual step back for playback. And in fact I’m learning to appreciate engraving and develop an interest in it because of Dorico (and a few forum members, whose posts have been an inspiration).
As for many different wishes and interests - of course, I agree. In fairness though, even the title of the thread is quite specific - integration between Dorico and Cubase. It would be very helpful to get a clarification (and a reassurance) on the depth of integration that the team thinks is possible for Dorico compared to other Steinberg products. I am worried there’s a real risk that “recreating Cubase bits” might end up being the approach for that too.
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I believe the situation is already quite different in freelancing and especially in remote (home based) work, with Nuendo getting a lot more visibility there.
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No idea, but it would take a major shift for studios to move away from Pro Tools. It’s been over 20 years since I last recorded in a studio that didn’t use it. In the last 5 years, here are some of the most recent studios I’ve recorded in. From big budget to small, all are running Pro Tools setups: Power Station, Bunker Studio, Mozart Studio, Oktaven, Stone Soup, Sound on Sound, Sear Sound, Morningstar Studios.
(Going back into the Power Station to finish a recording next month. If everything goes to plan, the guest vocalists on this are absolutely insane.)
It’s really all Pro Tools in recording studios.
I think you’re right about home production. I know quite a few musicians using Ableton and Logic as their primary DAWs.
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Ofc. I’m not seeing what’s suggested. I’m actively looking and trying to learn everyday. Whilst there are some amazing cubase videos. Honestly this forum is probably its biggest “social strength” atm. I learn so much here.
Personally I think they all offer unique takes so cubase it my love and I cheat in ableton sometimes.
I will say every major studio basically runs pro tools. But the ones I’ve been in that haven’t.
They don’t run S1 or logic. They run cubase.
People know what cubase can be.
Personally although I have gripes. Cubase is a cut above.
But*
Pro tools and S1 are gearing up better. Sketch pads are now essential tools at minimum. Not to mention loopers far more advanced than the arranger track are now the norm.
I’ve said in this forum before tho. On the cubase side 13 feels like 2.0 of their future software. So i wouldn’t be surprised if we’re waiting till V15 or 16 before we really see the potential. And I’m here for it!
This brings up an even broader point to consider:
I teach audio and MIDI/synth classes at the local community college. We are a Steinberg campus (and, thanks to my industry relationships, I’ve been Steinberg since Cubase 4, long before I started teaching).
My second announcement posted to the online learning system each semester is about DAW choices.
FWIS, if a person foresees a hardware mixer in their professional future, and if they are just starting out, the PreSonus ecosphere is the obvious way to go because of the level of integration offered. I recommend Steinberg to students who are not hardware mixer folks .
Yamaha/Steinberg could easily offer that same level of integration if they wanted to.
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Might be wrong, but I believe Yamaha still offers integration in a range of their Live Digital Mixing consoles, with a copy of Nuendo Live - which could of course be substituted by the user with a full Nuendo edition (presumably) or for that matter, Cubase…? Hardware consoles for live music venues purposes, can often happily be used for tracking/recording work as well…
I remember they used to (still do.?) bundle Cubase LE or AI with their lower budget mixers with the built-in USB audio interfaces, for the home/project studio market. Otherwise the old Yamaha N12 Digital mixer for example was a great bit of kit to work tightly together with Cubase /Nuendo. Sadly, a secondhand only purchase these days…
So, its definitely not been beyond them.!
Yamaha N12 Review: Powerful Digital Sound You Can Rely On - Produce Like A Pro
PS:- apologies - seriously off topic here now.!
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My perspective is that this is terrible and I absolutely would not want notation and DAW operating side-by-side. Bouncing information to-and-fro between apps is a poor solution. Instead, the goal should be for Dorico to surpass DAW capabilities, which it is already on the road to doing, and then there is no need to bounce things around.
There have been many other work-suites which used bounce to-and-fro work methods and they have always been problematic in the long run. Final Cut and Logic used to do this. Bounce here, bounce there, bouncing around everywhere. Various suites of Word Processing (“Productivity”) programs used to do this (for spreadsheet data or page layout publishing) and for specific niche work, the flow was okay, but in general and long term, it was terrible and finicky and prone to more failure than not. One app was always ‘ahead’ in feature-set of the other apps, and data or metadata would alternately break in transition. Every standard ever written, including current MusicXML, has various forms of incompatibility which make translation difficult, even if the translation is within a single company’s own products; the product teams will never align themselves to each others’ products or release cycles (even mission-critical R&D teams at NASA have such difficulties, and faults, big or small, are often created).
The solution will never be to have “two apps operating side-by-side and bouncing data”. It is a pipe-dream. The workable solution is to have the single app envelope all the desired features of other apps.
It is possible to split-window in Dorico and show both notation-score and DAW piano-roll simultaneously. They are instantly synchronized, of course, because they are the same file in the same app.
The issue to confront is: which features are missing from the piano-roll/mixing side of Dorico, which are possible new feature requests for Dorico, to finish projects?
From my perspective the main missing features are the ones which DAWs are built around: currently, importation and synchronization of audio files to playback with the score (using a synchronized tempo map). Guitar Pro (about $60) can already do this; it imports any audio file as an additional instrument track, and provides rubber-band dragging of barlines, to create a tempo map in the notation-score window. This allows for amazingly easy transcription capability and adding new orchestration over the audio, which is 100% perfectly tempo mapped to the audio file.
The years of “composing with MIDI piano-roll” are going to be over soon. Composing on a piano-roll, or on a spreadsheet-like row/column matrix, were a product of computer graphics limitations, which no longer exist. Piano-roll would never have been popular otherwise, because piano-roll is an inferior method of music composition. Any student who is currently composing on MIDI piano-roll is doing themselves a disservice. Orchestration and harmonization are to be visualized on a score, in notation, which is a diatonic set of a few lines: a form of vertical compression, while visually providing 100% of the information needed; DAWs and piano-roll only (essentially, mainly), provide a chromatic view of pitches which is at odds with comprehending harmony. Composing in a DAW piano-roll is not the way forward for a student of music or any serious composer. Ironically, DAW composers will fight to the death against this point, even though they are always writing 100% tonal music, which would easily present itself on a staff.
Present real project problems which can’t be solved in the current Dorico, and let the team solve it. Here is my actual afternoon composition some time ago, where I specifically used the Guitar Pro feature of importing an audio file as an ‘instrument track’, to add my own, new, orchestration via score. At the bottom edge of the video, the audio waveform and edited barlines can be seen scrolling across. I would have used Dorico; but, Dorico is not capable of doing this, yet:
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I read today that MIDI 2.0 is proposing a new feature - classification of orchestral articulations as a new attribute that’s independently set from any patch or bank. No idea what the advantage of this is supposed to be apart from live playing, but it prompted me to wonder about MIDI in general and MIDI 2.0 specifically when it comes to Dorico and Cubase.
Using loopMIDI, I can make Dorico speak MIDI to Cubase any time. Likewise, I can send MIDI data to Dorico from all of my MIDI keyboards and controllers and Dorico will record it in real time and play it back perfectly. Both Dorico and Cubase buffer MIDI even when it’s not being recorded and offer “retrospective recording”. But of course in either case it only goes in one direction and there is no synchronization in Dorico yet.
What I want to say here that even though Dorico doesn’t natively think in MIDI it certainly translates to and from it very well, even if it adds additional latency. So, it occurs to me that maybe the issue is here is not MIDI competency but the lack of direct and sync’d interface between Dorico and Cubase. The new MIDI 2.0 is fully bidirectional, higher resolution, improved timing accuracy and per note CC controls. As far as I know, Steinberg is already introduced some changes to MIDI resolution in Cubase 13, and I also noticed some new MIDI resolution parameters in Kontakt 7.
Perhaps this is an opportunity to get both program to lean to speak to each other in the same language.
(EDIT: this seems to be going in response to a different message than intended. Apologies for that)
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And therein lies the problem.
We each have our own personal wish list (based on our own particular vision and past experience).
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Why not both? Dorico could have better playback/DAW-like features, but for those of us who use a lot of mixed audio sources (synths, electric guitars, sound design, etc.) I can’t imagine notation software having any use there. It would be nice if the software could talk to each other for those of us who like that workflow – what I have in mind is dynamically linked elements which can be synced between, without the need of manual round-tripping.
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I’ve only been using Dorico since 3.5, but my impression is that every release has had a major amount of updates across the board. Even this recent 5.0 to 5.1 update was impressive in its breadth. I would highly doubt the development team would just do one big feature and some bug fixes for v6. I expect we’ll see a lot of good stuff in the future, something for everyone!
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@NicolasJC may as well ask - when will Notion embrace this level of engraving?
Different tools for different tasks. Be happy you have such a wide choice.
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