Understanding Dorico 5 (Saterday 24 June, 2023)
Music notation software has been around for a long time. Many of us know Sibelius, originally developed by Jonathan and Ben Finn, and which was released in 1993. In August 2006, Sibelius Software Ltd was acquired by Avid Technology, an American manufacturer of software and hardware for audio and video production. In July 2012, Avid announced plans to divest itself of its other consumer businesses, closed the Sibelius London office, and laid off the original development team. The large user protest resulted in the recruitment of a new team of programmers to continue Sibelius development in Montreal, Canada and Kyiv, Ukraine.
The orignal Sibelius team came together again within the German company Steinberg (known from Cubase). Here they were given the opportunity to build completely new software for writing music without all the ‘legacy’ and outdated techniques from the past with the possibilities of today such as tablets. The project was unveiled on 20 February 2013 by the Product Marketing Manager, Daniel Spreadbury, on the blog Making Notes. After 3 years of hard work, on 19 October 2016 , Dorico arrived! The name honours the 16th-century Italian music engraver Valerio Dorico (1500 – c. 1565). The Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) standard was also created by the Dorico development team. It provides a consistent standard way of mapping the thousands of musical symbols required by conventional music notation into a single font.
Dorico from Steinberg is a music notation program with a very comprehensive set of features to markup your music. At the moment of writing this post, I am using Dorico Pro 5 in combination with Cubase (see [here] how they can be synchronized). It takes some effort to master Dorico but it helps to understand some basic architecture of the program. Below, I tried to explain some basics of Dorico to get you going.
Layouts, Flows, and Players
The first thing to understand about Dorico 5 is the relation between Layouts, Flows, and Players (Figure 1).
Layouts combine musical content, as represented by flows and players, with rules for page formatting and music engraving, and allow you to produce paginated music notation that can be printed or exported in various formats. A Layout may show different Flows and each Flow shows one or more Players.
Flows are separate spans of music that are completely independent in musical content, meaning they can contain completely different players from each other and have different time signatures and key signatures. A single project can contain any number of flows.
Players can represent an individual musician or multiple musicians in the same section. Players hold one or more instruments, so you must add at least one player to your project before you can add instruments.
To actually hear sound in Dorico, each instrument must be connected to a VST (or Midi) instrument.
Another way of thinking about it is that Flows are about content and Layouts are about the presentation of that content. Layouts correspond to the things you will ultimately print out. Flows allow you to have more than one ‘piece’ of music in the layout (movement, vocal exercises, different songs, guitar fill, etc). Figure 2, 3, and 4 show an example.
Figure 1. The connection between Layouts, Flows, Players, Instruments, and VST instruments (VSTi). The players and VSTi shown here, correspond to the (section) player and VST instrument in Figure 2. For simplicity, only the Violin and Piano are connected to an Instrument. Note, that the Violin player is linked to two instruments.
Figure 2. Dorico’s example project ‘Pigmalion Petite Suite’ (Rameau). This music has three Flows (movements) shown at the bottom. The Full score Layout only shows the second and third Flow, and includes all Players (Instruments).
Figure 3. Dorico’s example project ‘Pigmalion Petite Suite’ (Rameau). Here the first Flow (Pigmalion suite) is selected. On the left side you can see that this Flow does not include all Players. On the right side you see that this Flow is shown in all Layouts, except the Full Score layout. In the dropdown menu I have selected the Flute 1 & Petite flute Layout.
Figure 4. Dorico’s example project ‘Pigmalion Petite Suite’ (Rameau). I selected the Flute 1 & Petite flute Layout on the right side. This Layout includes all three Flows but only the Flute 1 & Petite flute 1 player. The player holds two instruments (Flute 1 and Petite flute 1).
Want to know more about Layouts, Flows, and Players? Then see these videos:
Playback templates, VST Expression maps, and Endpoint configurations
To actually have Dorico playing your piece of music, further configuration is necessary. This brings you to the area of Playback templates, VST Expression maps, and Endpoint configurations (Figure 5).
A Playback template allocate sounds from VST instruments and MIDI devices to the instruments in your project. Playback templates combine the following information in order to obtain correct playback:
- The instrument sounds, articulations, and playback techniques provided by the VST instruments
- The expression/percussion maps required to obtain those sounds
- The endpoint configurations required for the sounds for each instrument
Expression/percussion maps tell Dorico Pro how to use appropriately the patches and sounds in the VST instruments that you have loaded into your project.
- Specify dynamics and volume in playback.
- Specify the playback techniques that are supported by each patch in your project.
Endpoint configuration. “Endpoint” is the term used for the unique combination of inputs and outputs that together allow the correct sounds to be played for each instrument. In Dorico Pro, each endpoint brings together the following:
- A VST instrument or MIDI output device instance
- A specific channel on that VST instrument or MIDI output device
- The patch or program assigned to that channel
- The expression map and/or percussion map that describes the instrument or instruments that can be played by that patch or program, and the playback techniques and articulations provided.
Or, as explained by John Baron, “Endpoints are the mapping of the single or section player instrument to the VST instrument and which expression/percussion map is needed. Playback templates are the shareable grouping of one or more endpoint configuration(s)” .
Figure 5. The relation between the Playback template, Endpoint configurations (Figure 7, 8), Expression maps (Figure 6), VST instruments, (section) players, and Space Template. Note that this figure the ‘Instrument’ (shown in Figure 1) is left out for simplicity.
Figure 6. Dorico Expression map for HALion Sonic Orchestra (HSO) Cello Solo. It shows that Pizzicato is mapped to key switch C#0
Figure 7. Dorico Playback Template. The template for BBC Symphonic Orchestra (BBCSO) is mapped to five Endpoint configurations. The Endpoint configuration ‘BCSO Pro Strings provides a mapping to Players (e.g., Violin section player) and the VST instrument (e.g., BBCSO Violin I). This Playback template uses the ‘ Concert Hall’ Space template (which is not used by BBCSO since the instruments are already panned correctly by BBCSO itself).
Figure 8. Dorico Endpoint setup. In Play mode the Endpoint configuration is defined. Here you see the mappings for the ‘Pigmalion Petite Suite’ (Rameau). It only use a singe VST instrument (HALion Sonic SE), which has been loaded with 14 instruments (Figure 9). Most of these instruments are mapped to an specific Expression map.
Figure 9. HALion Sonic SE loaded with instruments for the ‘Pigmalion Petite Suite’ (Rameau).
A very useful video explaining the concepts in Figure 5 (playback templates) is found on YouTube:
Linking music notation and expression maps
The only thing left to know is how the expression map with different articulations is linked to the actual music notation. This is shown in Figure 10.
Figure 10. Left. Expression maps are linked to Playback techniques that serve as a linking pin to Playing techniques that define the actual notation (text or glyph’s). The ‘Playing technique’ font is used in the notation. Other playing techniques are shown by symbols (glyph’s) that make use of the SMuFL font (symbols). Right. Example of two playing techniques for violin (spiccato and natural harmonics) linked to specific key-switches in the BBCSO expression map. Figure 11 shows the actual notation.
Figure 11. Short violin part showing the spiccato (text) and natural harmonics (glyph) articulations. Spiccato is shown in the strings playing techniques panel on the left. The natural harmonics is in the same panel but in the top part in the ‘Common’ category (not shown).
References
- Dorico 5 Manual
- Dorico expression maps (Steinberg)
Last updated on April 1st, 2024 at 08:10 am
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