We are pleased to announce the availability of a guide targeted at helping new Dorico users quickly understand the application’s key concepts and workflows. Titled First Steps, and written by our intrepid technical author, Lillie Harris, it will take you through a complete project from start to finish, reproducing a short piano miniature by the Croation composer Dora Pejačević, and follow this up with an extract of a song by Ma Rainey.
The guide covers everything from project setup, finding your way around Dorico’s project window and user interface, note input and editing, adding other notations such as slurs, ties, articulations, clefs, octave lines, and explains the core layout and formatting tools you need to produce perfect pages of music. After a few hours, you will have input a charming waltz, made it look great, and in the process you will have learned all of the fundamental concepts required to use Dorico successfully and efficiently.
At the conclusion of the Pejačević project, you can then proceed to learn about some more idiomatic notations, including lyrics, chord symbols, and writing for drum set. Even if you think that your own use of Dorico will be more in the realm of Ma Rainey’s blues than in Pejačević’s salon music, we nevertheless recommend that you work through the piano piece first, as that’s where all of the key concepts and workflows are introduced.
Currently, First Steps is only available in English, but it is in the process of being translated into German, French, Italian and Japanese, and those translations will be published as soon as possible.
If you’re looking for further helpful tools for learning and using Dorico more efficiently, the Resources page here on the blog is a veritable treasure trove of information, with links to all of the documentation published by Steinberg, plus third-party books, video courses, hand-outs, and much, much more. Finally, if you are experiencing any kind of difficulty with learning or using the software, please don’t hesitate to come to the Dorico forum and ask your question there: you will find a community of knowledgeable and helpful Dorico users from around the world, and several Dorico team members – including yours truly and Lillie – are frequent posters, too. If you have any feedback on the First Steps guide, please feel free to share it on the forum, or if you prefer, you can contact me directly.
I am so happy to be working on the first steps tutorials. The user manual of 1300+ pages overwhelms me a bit. This is a great new resource I feel like working on start to finish. I’m currently at page 21 and have already solved some mysteries. I hope to become faster and more fluid with Dorico.
@Leslie: I’m really happy to hear this, and I know Lillie will be happy to hear it too!
Excellente nouvelle! Merci pour la localisation! On vous aime!
Thanks for making this available. This is my first software for scoring music. The “First Steps” tutorial was a life saver for me. Bravo!
Trying to find out how to write for my accordeon a chord of three notes of which one is a quarter note and the other two are halve notes. I do not succeed to get the two different durations in one “carrot”..
@Jan: You need to use what are called in Dorico multiple voices. Each voice allows you to have an independent rhythm simultaneously with other notes of different durations on the same staff. Try starting here in the Operation Manual.
I bought Dorico a couple of years ago after researching and talking to people. I also bought a guide book on amazon which was no help for me. I just got into the program and started trying things. They worked. Before my son left for Asia, he uploaded Dorico 4 SE. I just noticed it was SE tonight Feb 27th 2023. I tried to do the same things I had done on 3.5 Pro and nothing worked. Can you direct me please? I am currently writing a symphony and thought I would try Dorico out. Absolutely nothing would work but I did manage to add some bars . I could not get the metronome to go either way which I had before. I am really excited to know how to use this. Hopefully it will save time. I wrote out a 130 page concerto by hand and am thinking about writing this out by hand as well, but for an orchestra to play I have to have notes they can read lol. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you so much
Hi Nancy. For getting started with Dorico I recommend either the ‘first steps’ or ‘getting started PDF’ available here: https://blog.dorico.com/resources/
If you are looking to write for more than two instruments you will need more than Dorico SE, but it sounds like you have v3.5 Pro too.
Hi,
I have some piano pieces I’ve written, all with multiple “out of key” chords (sorry for the incorrect terminology, I’m self taught and wish I knew more).
Would Dorico SE be able to take the MIDI (I have Cubase Pro 12) and generate a full two- handed piano score with lyrics? Would I be able to tell it, e.g., “Actually that’s a C#m, not a Dbm, please revise”, or tell it to annotate a chord as a “Cm7,-5” instead of “C half diminished”, etc.?
Is there a tutorial for Dorico SE?
Thank you so much!
Alexis 🙂
@Alexis: Thanks for your comment. Yes, you can import MIDI from Cubase, and Dorico will do a good job of figuring out how to notate it cleanly, including identifying the right key signature and accidentals. It won’t add chord symbols automatically, but you can easily add them using Dorico’s quick and easy-to-use chord symbol input features.