The Path to Professionalism – Starting Out with Dorico

When it came to building Dorico, our intention was to create a scoring program that was as useful for young musicians just starting out as it was for professional composers with years of experience. We wanted it to be easy enough for anyone to use, but with advanced features and musical intelligence far beyond any other music notation software. In this new series, we’ll be exploring how Dorico can help students and recent graduates on their path to professionalism. Here, we explain why adopting Dorico at an early stage can help you to future-proof your career.

Future-proofing scorewriting

The Dorico development team’s considerable accumulated knowledge and expertise helped to craft an entirely new program from scratch, with the needs of today’s musicians in mind. Where previous programs, including Sibelius and Finale, are limited to building on foundations laid in the 1990s, before broadband, sample libraries and classroom computers were commonplace, Dorico has been built from the ground up to fully capture the capabilities of today’s technology.

By starting out from a position of innovation, Dorico is perfectly positioned to keep up with the rapid pace of development. Computers are introducing more CPU cores so that they can carry out more operations simultaneously, and at a faster rate, and Dorico has been built to harness this power – so that as your projects become more ambitious, it won’t struggle to deliver the same high quality of results.

Dorico has also been designed to understand music in a far more human, three-dimensional way than any comparable software. While humans can learn the visual language of music notation to the point of intuition, turning this into written notation that can be understood by the people playing it is far trickier – especially for musicians still practicing their craft. Dorico simplifies the entire process by breaking it down into individual elements, before weaving them back together seamlessly. Every time you enter a note or edit your score, over 100 processors are toiling away under the program’s hood, creating music that mixes absolute clarity with the more natural flow of human input.

How does this help your career?

In order to achieve a successful career, a musician today requires a tool that allows them to adapt to changing circumstances. Dorico’s nuanced understanding of music and composition makes it the only software you can compose directly into, producing clear results without the need for constant tweaks and adjustments. As well as this, it can comfortable be used from a laptop, without countless extra screens and monitors. By making it easier to write and edit your music, wherever you are, Dorico’s level of flexibility is ideal for musicians learning the ropes of composition.

As your knowledge and experience continues to grow, Dorico’s advanced features can help you to confidently create compositions on a much more ambitious scale. Its 64-bit processor accesses the entirety of your computer’s memory, allowing it to keep pace with the increasing demands of virtual instruments and deliver realistic playback of your music as it progresses.

To ensure that Dorico remains at the forefront of music composition software, we’ll be releasing regular updates. However, we wanted to keep the user experience as accessible as possible – which means there’s no subscription plan, no ongoing cost, and no technical support charge. Once you’ve purchased the latest version of Dorico, or upgraded from an earlier version, all subsequent upgrades within that version are completely free.

With its combination of usability and high-end performance, Dorico has been future-proofed to remain at the cutting edge of composing software through every stage of your career – from the classroom to the concert hall.