Episode 13: Adventures with Dorico, Part 2
by Lori Archer Sutherland · Published · Updated
Part 2 of 2 of Lori’s adventures with Dorico notation software. Here I’ll talk more about using the software and some of the cool things it can do.
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https://www.steinberg.net/dorico/
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Episode
13: Adventures with Dorico, Part 2
Intro
Hello
and welcome to Tonal Diversions. I’m your host, Lori Archer Sutherland, and
this is my journey as a multifaceted musician. I’m a composer, clarinetist and more
who is navigating the world of is classical music, and I’d love to share my
adventures with you.
Episode
proper
Welcome
back to part two of my adventures with Dorico. Let’s look some more at how the
software works. I won’t get into too many details since I’m not doing this as a
video, and there are some really good tutorial videos
out there already.
Like
with the previous episode, there will still be a lot of
comparisons to Finale since that’s what I’m used to.
The
Screen
First,
we’ll look at the screen real estate. There’s the top menu bar, which is fairly standard in any Windows program, and it has a lot of
what you’d expect—File, Edit, Help, etc. This selection will change depending
on what mode you’re in. So, if I’m writing, there will also be a Write menu
option. As I mentioned in the previous episode, the LibraryàOptions menu is really good to
remember.
The
right menu option has things like Transpose, but it also echoes what you’ll
find in what Dorico calls “popovers.” I think that once I remember that popovers
exist and I get used to them, I will love them. If I’m
trucking along with inputting notes and want to insert a dynamic marking, I
just hit ShiftàD and type in the
little box that pops up. So, if I type F, the forte symbol appears in the
music. There are a ton of popover options: key signatures, time signatures,
repeats, and more. I can see how these would save a lot of
time during input. It might not be quite as fast as some of
Finale’s hotkeys, but time will tell for me. And if I save time in other areas
because of the popovers, then not saving time for other things, it might be a
wash.
The
left panel has things like: select note, input chords,
articulations, and more. There are some things that
can be used together, and some things are affected by whether the Select icon
is active. I haven’t quite learned all the ins and outs of this yet, so we’ll
see how I feel later on with all of these processes.
For icons on the left panel that have the little corner arrow, either long
press or right click to access the rest of the options. I will admit I actually had to look that up because I felt like you just
had to click on the little arrow part and it would open, and it didn’t. But
luckily, the answer was out there very easily.
The
right panel has things like clefs, key and time signatures, tempo markings and
stuff like that. A lot of these things can also be
accessed via popovers.
The
bottom panel is for properties of certain things, plus it has more of the DAW
interface options for those unfamiliar. A DAW is a “digital audio workstation.”
I know there were a few notation things that happen to
be hidden down there, so I do need to remember to check here when I’m searching
for things. I haven’t yet played around with the drum pad, piano roll,
fretboard, or virtual piano keyboard to know exactly how to use them. I’m
firmly planted in the notation world, both for composing and engraving. Someday
I might tinker with these other options, but I think my first
priority is learning the notation side of Dorico.
Jump
(Awesome) Bar and Undo
Dorico
4 introduced the jump bar. I think the jump bar should be renamed the “awesome bar.” All you have to do is
hit J on your keyboard and this magical little box appears where you can either
launch a command or find out where an option lives. It also lets you navigate
to various bars, pages, or flows within your project. Plus, you can create your
own jump bar aliases. So. if you know you use something frequently via the jump
bar, you can set an alias to that. I think there’s a lot of
possibilities for this, and I’m excited to start finding little shortcuts that
I can do via the jump bar.
While
this doesn’t have to do with the visual of the workspace, I miss the undo and
redo lists from Finale. I appreciate that there’s an undo function because I
use that all the time in pretty much any program that
I use. But Finale let you access a list of actions, and it was so much easier
to go back to a much earlier point instead of hitting undo twenty times and
sometimes kind of guessing if you went back far enough.
Note
Input
For
note input, there are several ways to do it. You can
use the mouse, keyboard, MIDI keyboard, and probably some of
the DAW features I mentioned earlier. I’ve been using a combination of the
computer keyboard and my MIDI keyboard, and it’s going pretty
well. There is enough that’s like what I’m used to in Finale that I feel
like I’m getting the hang of it pretty quickly, at
least for doing one note at a time in one staff.
I
like that Dorico seems so much more intelligent about rests than Finale. With
Finale, you start at the beginning of a measure—period. If you need rests at
the beginning of a measure, you input those first before entering the notes
that follow. With Dorico, your notes get input wherever the cursor is. So, if
you’re in common, 4/4 time and you put an eighth note somewhere other than the
beginning of the measure, Dorico understands that and fills in the appropriate
rests at the beginning of the measure. And that is really
cool, let me say! I do have to be careful though, as I’ve meant to put
notes in the beginning of the measure and not realized that my cursor was not
there. So, I end up with rests at the beginning, and that’s where that undo key
comes in really handy. I’ll get used to it, and ultimately, I do like this way better. It also
understands more when you shift notes rhythmically regarding how rests and even
other notes should adjust.
There
are a couple of different ways to input multiple notes
at once, and I’m still figuring out the ins and outs as to when you need to
activate the chord function in order to add notes and when you can just input
them all at once via the MIDI keyboard. And then also what might work best with
the popover. I need to look at more tutorials or articles on how to do that. It
also seems to be picky about what you can do with note
input if “select” is still toggled on. I haven’t figured all of that out yet
either.
Can
I just say that I love that tied notes move together if you have
to change pitch? That’s always been such an annoyance with Finale, and
while I realize that this is an episode about Dorico, I’ll add that StaffPad
also moves tied notes together. In Finale, it never made sense to me that you
had to change the pitch of all the tied notes, which was especially annoying if
you had a lot of measures of the same tied note, which
I’ve had to do before. I’m guessing it’s an old programming thing, but that
doesn’t make it any less annoying.
Then
there’s insert mode. This is another thing that I am still learning my way
around and how best to use it. I do like that Dorico is more intelligent about
how the notes you insert affect the rhythm of the measure. It seems like you
don’t have to do as much deleting and re-inserting
overall. But again, I’m still getting used to this, so I still have to delete and re-insert. But along with this, there’s
also a stop bar, and this is where you can essentially lock
a measure so that alterations you make before that don’t affect things beyond a
certain point. That will definitely be helpful!
Articulations and
Dynamics
Moving
on to articulations, dynamics and more. With articulations, I like that there
seems to be a mix-and-match as opposed to just a really long
list of all possible articulations. So, if I want the staccato and the tenuto,
I just click both of them instead of finding the specific
staccato-tenuto marking. And “paste articulations” is awesome!
Yes, there’s a similar feature in Finale, and I used that a
lot. But this one is so straightforward. When you’re pasting, you just right click and choose “paste special” and one of the
choices is “paste articulations”, and that is all you have to do. There’s more
magic in that “paste special” option, and I’ll get to that in a bit.
But
first we’ll talk about dynamics. There’s both an option on the left panel, but
also remember that this is a popover option. There are a couple of things that
I still need to figure out, like pretty much everything
in this program, there’s still a lot I need to learn. For example, I needed to
do fortissimo, then a decrescendo hairpin to piano. I had trouble getting it to
work until I was able to click the dynamic without first choosing a note. It’s
just another thing I have to play around more with to
see what I was really doing. Overall, I feel it’s easier to switch between
things like dynamics and articulations, between the popover option and having
more of these buttons in the side panels. It just seems like there are fewer
clicks overall to input these things. And again, some
things may still be a touch faster with Finale’s hotkeys, but that’s not a deal
breaker for me.
Paste Special Menu
And
back to the “paste special” option. This might be tied
with the jump bar for helpfulness. If you right click to paste something, you
can access the Paste Special menu. This lets you do things like copy or move to
the staff above or below, paste articulations, explode music, reduce music, and
swap music. There’s some really handy things that live
just in this easily-accessed option. Exploding means you can take chords in one
staff and have the notes move into their own separate staves. So, the bottom
notes of the chords move to one staff, the middle notes to another staff, and
so forth. And while I know you can do that in Finale, I seem to remember it’s
hidden away in a plugin. So, if you don’t have the plugin, you might not even
know that you can do this.
The
other thing I’m really excited for in the Paste Special option is the swap
feature. And this lets you swap music between two staves, possibly
more, but definitely two staves. I’ve only played with it a little bit,
but oh, it’s going to be so helpful for me when I compose and arrange. Because
there are times where I decide, no, this really needs to be in this other voice
or staff. And so I end up copying it to a new blank
staff in order to paste everything and it’s just convoluted. So, to be able to
just, with only a couple of clicks, tell it to switch staves, that’s going to
be so, so nice.
Engraving
So we’ll move away from note input
and go into engraving. Engraving is separate from writing mode. Overall, I
think that’s probably a good idea, but like with
everything else, it’s going to take time to get used to it. Because when I’m
doing initial input of the music itself, I don’t necessarily care how it looks
yet, and I don’t want to have to think about that at that point. I just want to
get the music into the program. Dorico has an interesting concept of assigning
whatever parts to whatever layouts. That should provide some really
good flexibility for certain pieces and ensembles. I haven’t necessarily
had to do anything with that yet in the music that I write, but I see where it
could be a really helpful thing.
And
as with the write mode, some things are definitely different
than Finale. For the purpose of the first couple of
pieces that I needed to print, I got things where I wanted them, even though
some of it was kind of “by guess and by God.” I know once I’m looking at
publishing stuff that I’ve produced in Dorico, I’m going to need to do a lot more learning in this part.
Playback
and XML
With
playback. I played the sample files and they sounded
pretty good. We’ll see how it sounds when I get a completed piece of my own in
there. It does have a built-in DAW, and I have really no experience in using
those. It seems like it would help those who want more control over their
playback, but I don’t know for sure. Eventually I will poke around in that
section, but in the meantime, if any of you have used the Dorico DAW, I would
love to hear from you and how it works and whether you like it.
And
finally, I do want to touch on importing from MusicXML.
For those of us coming from different programs, this is a really
nice feature to have and pretty much all the programs have some sort of
XML import/export feature. From StaffPad, I imported a short duet and it seemed
to work out okay. The most complicated thing in that piece were some grace notes and they came over fine. They weren’t
slashed, but I was able to figure out how to select those and get them slashed
in Dorico, so it wasn’t an issue. The instrument transposition also went well,
and it honestly went a little better than when I imported from StaffPad into
Finale.
I
also imported XML from Finale on a file that I’m working on
and it came over just fine. I did have a couple of issues with instrument
transposition and display, specifically contra alto and contrabass clarinet,
but I did do a little bit of internet searching and I was able to solve that
problem. It had to do with a forced clef versus letting Dorico do what it
needed to do for those instruments. And once I found out how to get rid of the
forced clef, things went fine. And now it transposes and displays just like I’m
used to.
What
will be interesting is I do want to try importing the ocarina octet that I did
into Dorico. I used Finale for that project even though I already owned Dorico,
because writing for ocarina was completely new to me and I was learning how to
write for that instrument so I decided I didn’t also
need to learn new software at the same time. Plus, that was a commissioned
project, so I didn’t want to add on extra time just so that I could learn how
to use the software. But now that the project is finished,
I’m looking forward to importing that into Dorico and see how it interprets
what I did to make all the different ocarinas sound and display like I wanted
them to.
Finale
just had one ocarina option for an instrument. I needed eight different ocarinas
of various transposition and range. So, yeah, it’ll be
interesting to see how Dorico handles that.
Conclusion
And
that concludes my adventures with Dorico. I’m enjoying the program. I do think
it was a good step to go ahead and buy and start using it. I think they have
done a lot of rethinking of how to get music into
printed form. I’m looking forward to learning a lot more about it and just
getting used to using it, and I think I’ll be very happy
with it. I plan to still keep Finale around for
various reasons, partly because I have so much work that was created in Finale
that it’s just easier to go ahead and at least keep that alongside Dorico. I
won’t necessarily upgrade Finale every time, but I already wasn’t upgrading all
the time anyway. It all kind of depended on budget,
but also what was actually getting fixed or improved in the program.
As
always, I would love to hear from you. Do you currently use any notation
software? What do you use? Do you like it? Are you thinking about switching to
anything else? That kind of stuff? So feel free to
email me, and I’d love to hear from you. Until next time.
Outro
Thank
you for listening to Tonal Diversions! Subscribe wherever podcasts are found and share with a friend until next time. Bye!