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What's your fastest way of getting notes accurately into Dorico?

musicalweather

musicalweather

Senior Member
Hi, I've been using Dorico for a while but am still very new to it. I like a lot of things about it and am figuring out how it can fit efficiently in my workflow. At first I did note input via step recording (playing my midi keyboard + using the number keypad). This was excruciatingly slow, though I suppose with practice I could get faster. I recently tried recording my midi keyboard playing live. That was pretty clunky until I discovered that I had to uncheck "detect duplets" and "detect grace notes." Much better after that. It also helps to record at a slower tempo. But ultimately, I still end up having small segments that need a lot of editing - enough that it's almost not worthwhile trying to record live. I often just end up erasing the problematic segment and inputing the notes using step record. So my questions are:

Does anyone regularly use live keyboard playing for note input in Dorico? How much time do you spend cleaning up faulty notation?

For those who don't input notes through live keyboard playing, are you pretty speedy with the other methods?

I guess my ultimate question is whether Dorico can work feasibly in my workflow. Right now, it's just pretty cumbersome. I'd like to find a way of getting the notes in fast and accurately.

Thanks for any info.
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I never use live playback, simply because I'm not good enough at the keyboard for that. So I always use step input, which works pretty fast for me, but that's of course also because I'm really used to it.
Please note that there are several ways of speeding things up with commands to repeat phrases, lengthen / shorten notes with shortcuts or key commands, copy to staves above or below. If the rhythm is the same, then you can set dorico to keep the rhythm while inputting other notes and so on. There are videos on YouTube or on the website to learn more about this, but I think Dorico can be fast enough to quickly enter notes with step input.
 
I, also, never use live input. Mostly because my music is too rhythmically complex and the software's translation is just too faulty. I work on a MIDI keyboard with a Streamdeck sitting on top of it with all the shortcuts. I designed my own, which is freely available, and I can input faster than even with pen and paper!
 
I used live input on several occasions. In my experience, the first thing to do is to carefully calibrate MIDI input latency in Preferences and to set quantization. But even then, my conclusion was that live playing is better suited for creating an actual performance and it comes with a price, just like in Cubase - heavy editing of displayed notation.

For normal note input, I use the MIDI keyboard (right hand) and PC keyboard (left hand), and reverse for low registers. This method took a little getting used to, mentally, in terms of hand coordination and I was quite slow at first. But now I'm sure it's faster than pen and paper.

Usually I work in two passes. First, I input the notes and per note articulations only and then slurs/ties and other articulations. In the beginning, I wanted to input everything in a single pass but my error rate was too high (especially for slurs). Also I very heavily use the "Repeat Item" and "Lock Duration" features, especially in a sequence, as Woodie mentions above. Ultimately, it comes down to a bit of practice and thinking through the key command set up that fits with the desired workflow.
 
For me, step input with right hand on Midi keyboard to enter notes and left hand mostly on StreamDeck where I've set all the common commands/macros I need at the press of a button. StreamDeck was the key to speeding up the workflow for me. I also use the qwerty keyboard occasionally for a few easy custom key commands I've set up. My goal is to avoid the mouse as much as possible - I don't want to be selecting from menus or icons etc, so StreamDeck for macros and creating custom key commands in Dorico allowed me to circumvent most of that. I also think MetaGrid for Dorico could help speed up workflow but haven't tried it yet.
 
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I use the keyboard for durations and midi keyboard for note input.

I also use live recording for stuff that require more expression and deal with the editing afterwards.

I think live recording can be cool if you want to record something with two hands. I bet a good pianist would be able to input notes quite quickly that way and then explode them to their corresponding instruments.
 
joebaggan said:
For me, step input with right hand on Midi keyboard to enter notes and left hand mostly on StreamDeck where I've set all the common commands/macros I need at the press of a button. StreamDeck was the key to speeding up the workflow for me. I also use the qwerty keyboard occasionally for a few easy custom key commands I've set up. My goal is to avoid the mouse as much as possible - I don't want to be selecting from menus or icons etc, so StreamDeck for macros and creating custom key commands in Dorico allowed me to circumvent most of that. I also think MetaGrid for Dorico could help speed up workflow but haven't tried it yet.
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Yes, that's my method as well.
 
If I want to enter music by playing, I usually do it in Logic, and then import the MIDI file in Dorico. Adaptive Tempo is a great thing, for an inaccurate pianist like me.

However, with the new ability of moving written notes without touching the live recording, I think things may change. Yes, Dorico has not yet implemented something like Adaptive Tempo, but if playing at the metronome this can be a big advancement. Play at the click, but with all the rubato you want. Cleaning the score will be very easy.

Paolo
 
musicalweather said:
Does anyone regularly use live keyboard playing for note input in Dorico?
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I do, but I'm a pianist. I get good results, depending on what kind of material it is. Obviously very complicated tuplets I don't rely on Dorico to decipher (although it does a pretty good job, honestly!), but 8th/quarter triplets and the rest work quite well. And it's so easy to edit notation in Dorico now that I don't even notice much if I have to do some. Also Paolo's (former?) method - to record in Logic and then import into Dorico, including a tempo map - is a nice method.

I also use the keypad sometimes, and you do get much faster at it if you do it for a while. For some material it can be the fastest way. I have a separate key pad that I can put anywhere (it was cheap) and that speeds it up even more for me. I find Dorico to be fast and easy, now that I'm used to it.

Since we're here....how is scrub working for people? I find it buggy and jittery,l although I have not updated Dorico to the recent dot release. Scrub works, but not reliably for me. In Finale it was like butter! I know that Dorico has to deal with a lot more samples, data etc than Finale 15 years ago did, but it should be smoother to be usefull.
 
To get consistent result you need to fiddle with the midi preferences ( offsets and stuff) then after playing re-quantise. Once it's set up properly it's pretty consistent and great and multiple voices too!...It just takes practice but totally worth it

best

e
 
ed buller said:
To get consistent result you need to fiddle with the midi preferences ( offsets and stuff) then after playing re-quantise. Once it's set up properly it's pretty consistent and great and multiple voices too!...It just takes practice but totally worth it

best

e
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Yes, adjusting quantize from the settings and using requantize works quite well once you get used to it. I forgot to mention that.

If you don't need to keep the live recording you can go to play and use override playback or an option named similarly and it adjusts the playback to the notation.
 
Thank you all for weighing in - really appreciate your thoughts and insights. I've been wrestling with Dorico the last few days. It seems nearly everything you want to do can be done, but sometimes it's a matter of hunting down the right commands in obscure menus or dealing with baffling terms. (Shouldn't the quantize settings [for live recording] be accessible in a key command? I find it annoying to go to Preferences, then click on Play, then scroll down to quantization, click desired resolution, then click apply, then click close... Quantization setting/resolution can change often, so i don't understand why it's not more quickly accessible. Maybe someone can enlighten me as to whether there's a key command for this.).

I'm going through the Udemy course on Dorico, which has you create scores for each lesson. We'll see if I can speed up my note input.
 
Bollen said:
I, also, never use live input. Mostly because my music is too rhythmically complex and the software's translation is just too faulty.
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Same. I'm a decent pianist but my rhythms are often highly syncopated and complex. I used to try live input but found I was pulling my hair out just cleaning up the mess afterwards, between the notation quantization and playback overrides. I discovered I could get to my idea faster and more precisely by using a keyboard with step input.

Also if anything, it's improving my abilities with notating complex rhythms (which I can play live a lot easier than I can write or read), so learning how to adapt those rhythms to notation has been a good skill to work on for me at least.
 
I have the beta neural link option loaded so I just think the notes and Dorico automatically transcribes it. 😂

But seriously I use a keyboard to enter notes in step time. Then I do a whole Lotta adjustments of note lengths and such.
 
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