Tip: Force the duration of notes
- Dorico uses musical rules to determine how durations are notated.
- These depend on things like meter and context, and can be set in Notation Options.
- You can override these settings for specific notes using Force Duration.
- Uncheck Force Duration to revert to Dorico’s default.
Tip: Create a vocal score layout with piano reduction
- Sometimes you may have a project for choir and orchestra, and need to produce a vocal score that contains a piano reduction. The piano reduction should not appear in the Full score.
- Add a new player and assign a piano to it. Create your piano reduction, perhaps using some of Dorico’s powerful editing features.
- In Setup mode, select the Full score from the Layouts panel, and in the Players panel uncheck the Piano player. This will mean the piano reduction is not shown in the Full score layout.
- Create a new Custom Score layout, give it a name, and check any player you want to appear. In this case, that would be all of the vocal players and the piano reduction. Remember also to check all flows you want to appear in the layout.
- Choose the Vocal score from the layout selector in the toolbar. You may need to make some changes to layout options in order to get the layout looking exactly how you want.
Marching percussion template for Tapspace Virtual Drumline
Update January 2024:
There is now a full VDL template available to purchase as a third-party addition to Dorico from Eric Kruse on the Score Sauce website. Please visit for details and pricing or any questions.
February 2020:
The current default marching instruments in Dorico for e.g. marching tenor drums or bass drums are not automatically mapped for use with Tapspace’s Virtual Drumline (VDL) and also do not contain as many notehead types (percussion techniques) as you might need. I’ve therefore created a Dorico template file (link below) with the noteheads created and mapped for playback using VDL 2.5.5.
You may have used a template for other software before and will hopefully find this one uses a similar mapping of noteheads to percussion techniques. To make writing for drumline as quick as possible in Dorico I’ve also mapped the noteheads/techniques across two octaves of your MIDI keyboard. By setting the Dorico preference for note input to ‘use staff position’ and with a minimum four-octave keyboard you can both switch notehead types and enter notes for any drum. For ease, the notehead mapping is the same across snare drums, tenor drums and bass drums, with only a few minor tweaks for cymbals.
Standardised notehead mapping for snare, tenor and bass drums in Dorico
For full details, please also see the included Drumline documentation PDF as it explains the note input preferences you need to set in Dorico to use the template as well as the mapping across the keyboard and a full list of the available noteheads for snareline, tenorline, bassline and cymballine.
You will also need Dorico 3.1 or later, and if playback is important to you, please make sure you have VDL 2.5.5 installed and working before using this template.
- Download Dorico VDL Template (zip, 2.6MB, updated 20th October 2020)
You can also watch the Discover Dorico session where we discuss and show the template in detail here: Discover Dorico Hangout on YouTube.
FAQs
The included Drumline documentation PDF also has a common questions section as the noteheads will not audition correctly as you enter the notes (but will on playback) and there are also some tweaks you can make in Play mode for some of the extra techniques that require MIDI CC messages.
I do not suggest making your own changes to this template at the moment, but if there changes and suggestions that you have to improve the template please get in touch with John via our forum or community Facebook group.
Tip: Requantize parts of a recording to notate tuplets
- Remember to set the Quantization Options before starting real-time recording.
- Unless your recording will contain mostly tuplets, I suggest disabling Detect tuplets.
- Once you have recorded you music, select any notes that should be written as tuplets (holding down Ctrl/Cmd to add to the selection).
- Go to Edit > Requantize… and choose the relevant settings for your performance (this will include enabling Detect tuplets if you are wishing to requantize those notes as tuplets).
- Press OK, and the selected music is requantised using the new settings. You can do this as much as you need across an entire performance in order to achieve the correct notation.
Tip: Convert the first bar of a flow into a pick-up bar
- In Dorico, there is no penalty for changing your mind. If you decide that the first bar of your piece should be a pick-up bar, it is very easy to edit.
- Remove the unwanted time at the beginning of the first bar. You can do this either by using the System Track (hold down Alt/Option in order to be able to select beats rather than bars), or by using the Shift+B Bars and Barlines popover. The syntax for removing time is a minus sign followed buy a number and the unit (q = quarter note, e = eighth note and so on).
- Edit the time signature/meter to include a pick-up bar by double-clicking it, and adding the number of beats the pick-up should have after a comma.
- It doesn’t matter which order you perform these two actions.