Hi Gagarin Cellist,
there are actually wonderful short videos, highlighting certain aspects of Dorico, all less than a minute, called “TipsTuesday”. That is probably, what you are looking for (look at the Shorts “TipsTuesday”).
There are also a couple of short videos about Dorico 6 improvements - these were the first videos I watched - even before I was able to “grab” the update to version 6.
Just a little critic from here. The naming scheme of the “players instruments” is absolutely bonchers…
“4-String Bass”? Last I checked it was called an electric bass with 4 strings. “4 strings” usually written in paranthesis.
And I can never write myself to a “Tuba in Bb” or a “Bass in Bb” as it is called. When I try to the dialog directs me to the singers category.
My frustration with your naming instruments is red hot.
So I wish that you would correct this, so I don’t have to sit 5 minutes and search for an instrument I could have found in 1, if you had been so kind as to use the normal spoken reference word for it.
Hello Charsten,
“languague”,
I mean which language have you chosen for your instrument names? Sometimes, switching between languages might give you unexpected results. I also found that after .xml import into Dorico there were “new” instruments temporarily appearing in dialogs, which must have come from the import.
If you just start typing the instrument name, it will come up. Here as soon as I typed ele then Electric Bass was selected, no need to search for it:
Additionally, as of D5 this entire dialog is customizable. Just go to Library / Instruments and you can change any of the instrument definitions that you want. You can change the names to be exactly what you want, change the definitions, change the instrument family, etc.
One way around this could be with a user-defined “exception” list. While Dorico provides the “base” (99.99%), any personal ‘ideal’ could be specified in a text file for import in Dorico. This is how I do hyphenation of ‘difficult’ words in TeX.
If you set the instrument language to German in Preferences > General > Instrument Names
then you get Tuba and even Bass (which is a term mainly used in Switzerland) in the Brass section. The instrument names remain German even if the application language is set to English.
Oh, oh! Here’s one I keep forgetting to ask for!
Could we get the ability to set the default harmonic to 4th harmonic instead of the octave?
For those of us who write for orchestra we mostly write for orchestral strings, and thus mostly require the artificial or natural 4th harmonic. None of the strings in the orchestra actually use an 8ve artificial harmonic.
It would just be nice to press on the button in the lower panel for harmonic and have it automatically give a 4th, rather than an octave which then forces us to cycle through available nodes until we get to the 4th. It would be a tiny time saver. nothing major, but still a quality of life improvement.
Yep. That was on my list as well (scroll up to six days ago). Never would use an octave partial-that doesn’t sound possible to me as a former violinist, but maybe there are strings that can do it?
My other big one: better accidental management. I was fixing a ton of accidentals in a new work of mine; in multiple measures, there could be four 16ths with Gb followed by 12 16th notes of F#. That makes no sense, as well as some measures that had a Cb. I managed to filter those notes and respell them, but I do wish there were something like (sorry about this…) Finale’s menu bar item to “prefer sharps” or “prefer flats” to just be able to select all notes in a muddled section and have a consistent spelling.
Hi all,
Being able to move hairpins and dynamic markings freely is my top wish right now. The Dorico philosophy of having one dynamic attached to one note sounds like something dreamt up by a pianist, it doesn’t really work for long string or wind notes, which need to evolve. OK, there’s a workaround - select your long note; divide into shorter notes with scissor tool (U) to remove ties, or break into grid resolution notes (Alt+U), add dynamics to those, then tie them back together (T), but it’s a bit of a pain.
You can do this with the caret! Here’s a quote from Pianoleo in another thread…
Adding to this:
You can do it in Engrave Mode
I usually enter these long dynamics by breaking the note with U, and then re-tieing it as described above. I’ve tried Pianoleo’s method, but it freaks me out not being able to see the hairpin until you’re done. I imagine a more elegant solution may be on the team’s list.
Luckily, that’s not part of Dorico’s philosophy! 
Dorico certainly makes it easy to apply things like p<facross any selected note or notes; but it’s perfectly possibly to add hairpins and other dynamics at any point on the duration grid.
And you certainly don’t have to untie and retie long notes.
That adjusts the graphical appearance of the hairpin – it doesn’t move it. E.g. you could place a hairpin in bar 4, and adjust the horizontal position so that it is in bar 5 – but the playback would still be in bar 4; and if it’s a local change, it won’t apply to other layouts… etc.
Good morning,
I would like to add to the wishlist an option that
Of course, pressing backspace on a manually adjusted (red) staff should be enough to tell Dorico to recalculate. But it is really annoying in a big project with many pages and flows that there is no way to include (for example for an extended edition of the same book) new flows without having to do once again all the vertical spacing for the whole book.
So please, please consider that for an update of Dorico 6!
Many thanks in advance!
(I know there are possibilities in the Layout options, but in my case they can only help partly. For the moment I follow the advice of adjusting the vertical spacing only at the end, but as explained that doesn’t really solve the whole problem.)
