![]() ![]() This is an example of how well Dorico does in the engraving department. You type all the score details (title, composer, copyright etc) into a table and all these things automatically appear in all the right places in your score and every part (because of the ‘tokens’ you will see in the ‘layouts’ section). There is a neat feature called ‘project info’. ‘Print’ mode gives you all the usual print and export options. ‘Play’ mode gives you a sequencer style view of your music, although you can also play it back in write mode. ‘Engrave’ mode allows you to deal with things like margins and positions of things like titles etc. I won’t describe it here, but it’s easy enough to work out where things are. The screen layout is very logical, with the things you need in sensible groups. I generally do this with one hand on my qwerty keyboard for values and the other hand on my Midi keyboard for pitch, but there are other options. Once you have ‘set up’ your score, you go to write mode to enter key and time signatures and get the notes in place. The starting point being a player rather than an instrument is a useful concept, because it means that one musician can easily be in charge of several instruments on the same stave (eg doubling on clarinet and sax). Initially, there is ‘set up’ mode where you set the main parameters of your piece: players and their instruments being the main one. One has to be done in ‘write’ mode and the other in ‘engrave’ mode. ![]() This may seem like an unnecessary complication at first, but it means that you cannot (for example) accidentally make a notational change to your score whilst altering margins. Dorico has modes that you can swap between depending on what you want to do. Let me give you a bit of a view on the way the program works. I do typeset music professionally, so it really does matter to me what the results look like as well as wanting to (sometimes) produce a score quickly and at the last minute. I still find myself dipping into the manual from time to time, but if I stop and reflect on how long it took to become an expert with Sibelius, I would say I have got to grips with Dorico much more quickly (I would consider myself to be an advanced user who does take advantage of a high percentage of the features). Foremost amongst those, of course, is that your score can be readily understood by any musician, whether he/she is a child in your GCSE Music class or a professional session musician in a studio. At first, it can be a bit hard to see how flexible the program is, because it really wants to educate you in all the conventions of correctly printed music. Dorico is a program that wants you to follow proper engraving rules. I am about nine months in (having purchased Dorico and moved on from my trial version) and now that I am understanding how the program works, I am getting great results with all kinds of scores. I got excellent results with all these scores and their parts. I recently typeset an arrangement of a Lutosławski piece that has different concurrent time signatures and a guitar piece that includes all the standard fingering indications. So, I decided on a jazz lead sheet including lyrics and chord symbols, a jazz combo score including a drum part, chord symbols and slash bars, a piece of classical chamber music and a piece of sacred choral music with multiple voices on each stave. I thought a good test of the program would be to typeset a variety of different types of music. I would say it took me at least a couple of months of trial and error and reading the (very good) online manual to get to grips with the main functions. Things just don’t happen the same way as they do in Sibelius. So, I downloaded the trial version and set to work on my latest score. ![]() The published examples looked very impressive from an engraving viewpoint. Steinberg’s Dorico seemed the obvious choice it was new and claimed to do everything one might need. I admit to looking for something new because of frustrations with Avid customer service and dissatisfaction with the changes to the Sibelius interface. So why swap after years of using this program, hours of accumulated expertise and hundreds of well produced compositions and arrangements? Or that it been very successful at every level of printed music production. Let’s face it, Sibelius has been the go to music notation program for publishers, teachers, composers and other music professionals for a couple of decades, and there is no doubting the credentials of its original designers and developers. ![]()
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