Category: Resources

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Getting Started with Dorico

So you just got Dorico or you have the trial, and now you want to know how to use it.

Here are a collection of resources and ideas I found helpful in my process:

How to Get Started

Recently, I retypeset and revised my 2010 orchestral piece Summer Has Ten Thousand Stars, making special use of the condensing feature.

The fastest way to learn Dorico is NOT to learn about the interface theoretically. Instead, copy something.

If you need ideas, here are a few:

Copying scores like this will surface a bunch of questions you otherwise wouldn’t think to ask (see “Tutorials” and “Getting Help” below).

References to Keep at Hand

Like learning an instrument, it’ll take a few months to get fluid at entering notes, symbols, and text. Until these commands enter your muscle memory, you’re going to want to have these references handy:

I still refer to these sheets on occasion.

Tutorials

Steinberg’s team has put together loads of excellent tutorials on their YouTube channel. Here are some highlights:

Dan Kreider also has a great beginner’s guide to Dorico on his website.

Getting Help

Wherever you go online, the Dorico team is super helpful and will typically get back to you within a day, if not hours of you asking your question. The larger community often will answer questions even faster.

I’m also happy to answer any questions you may have. Feel free to reach out via email (joseph@josephsowa.com) or any of my socials (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).

Lessons

If you want further instruction on how to use Dorico (or any professional notation program), I’m here to help. I’m happy to offer you private tutorials specialized to your specific musical goals. Email me for more details at joseph@josephsowa.com.

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How Dorico Makes Creating Score-Following Videos a Breeze

Among self-published composers, a common task is making making score-following videos, in which the sheet music follows along with the recording. Preparing your score for these videos is potentially super time-consuming. The hardest part — and the easiest to mess up — is cutting the score into screen-sized segments.

Using Dorico, however, making score follower images is a breeze. It took me less than 5 minutes today to create the images I needed for a video of my string orchestra piece Space Invaders!

Let me show you how I put it together.

1. Create a new score layout and change its page size

First up, in “Setup” mode, I created a new score layout and renamed it “Score follower sized.” (Obviously, you can name it whatever you want.)

Next, in the program preferences (command+, on Mac), I changed the “preferred unit of measurement” to points.

Change units of measurement

“Why do that?” you may ask.

To help make changing the page size easier.

Given that high-res video is 1920 × 1080 pixels, by setting the page size to that exact proportion, whatever we export will automatically be the correct size.

So, next, with my new layout selected in the layouts panel, I clicked the little widget at the bottom to pull up the layout options.

Here I changed the page orientation to “Landscape” and the page size to 960 × 540 points, which keeps the 1.78:1 proportion. Using points, rather than inches, meant I could use easy, whole numbers.

(Note: Dorico here thinks we’re specifying a physical page size, not the dimension in pixels, so as long as you keep the proportion correct, you can use whatever size best suits your content.)

2. Create and tweak your master pages

So with my score the correct size, I then tweaked the master pages in “Engrave” mode to make sure I had everything I wanted on each page.

For more on using master pages, check out this video.

3. Prepare it for export

With everything set, I switched over to “Print” mode. Here, I told Dorico to export my file as png graphics. I also made sure to set the resolution to 300 dpi, so that the images would be nice and crisp for the video.

Set resolution

Lastly, to make organizing these files simple, I went into the “Filename Options” and made sure that each file was numbered by page.

And with that, after pressing export, I had all the images I needed, all the right size:

4. Making the Video

From there, I imported the images into Final Cut Pro and aligned them with the audio. Using Final Cut (or iMovie, etc.) is beyond the scope of this post, but I do need to make one important note: Dorico exports images with a transparent background.

This transparent background is no problem, though. In Final Cut, I simply created a white background on which to layer my score images. (It’s also easy in iMovie.)

Conclusion

And there you have it: in less than 5 minutes, you too can use Dorico to create all the images you need for your next score follower video.

Now, could you do a similar thing in Finale or Sibelius? Sure, but you’d have to create a separate file — which opens up all of the version-control issues that go along with doing that.

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How to Be Productive and Sane While Working From Home

With COVID-19 sweeping the world, many of you many have joined me where I’ve been in for the past three years: working from home. As everyone is discovering, it’s tough.

Here are five tips I can offer from my experience as grad student and freelancer.

1: Log Your Hours

The temptation of having a fully flexible calendar is for you or others to equate “flexibility” with “endless free time.” You must work to disabuse yourself and others of this idea. Make and keep appointments with yourself.

Get a time-tracking app (or use a consistent notebook or spreadsheet) and log your billable hours (exclude bathroom trips, meals, non–work-related email and internet, etc.).

Logging billable hours is more useful than tracking your overall start and stop times, because it gives you a better indication of how much you’re actually working in a day. Everyone already knows that an “8-hour work day” doesn’t mean you’re working for a solid 8 hours. In practice, once you factor in the coffee and bathroom breaks, the unavoidable interruptions, the pointless meetings, and so on, an “8-hour work day” represents about 6 billable hours.

So when you’re working from home, shoot for that number. It should get you about where you need to be in terms of daily output.

2: Set a Morning Start Time and Don’t Sleep In

The most important appointment you set with yourself is the one first thing in the morning. If you don’t log at least a couple billable hours in the morning, it’s nearly impossible to log 6 billable hours by the evening.

Whether it’s an early bird hour (6 AM? 5 AM?) or a more night-owl friendly one (say, 9 or 10 AM), be sure to log at least one hour in the morning. You’ll thank yourself by the evening.

3: Take Your Downtime Seriously

The second most important appointment you set with yourself is in the evening. When you work from home, it can be tempting to just keep going. For your health and sanity, do not do that. Once you’ve reached whatever billable hour goal you set for the day,  you are free. Go take care of yourself: exercise, read a book, spend time with a loved one.

When working from home, it is crucial that you respect your human needs for food, exercise, sleep, and play. Otherwise, working from home quickly becomes unsustainable.

When I was working on my dissertation, I often had very little social time. I felt lucky if I could get in 2 social events per week. Despite that, it was some of the happiest months of my life, because I was otherwise taking care of myself. I had a routine that ensured I was well-fed, exercised, and had sufficient sleep.

Be sure to do the same for yourself.

4: Schedule Time to Talk with Colleagues

One of the benefits of working at an office or at a school is that you are surrounded by colleagues. They act as sounding boards and positive social peer pressure (“Hannah’s working right now, so I should be, too”). Even a five-minute chat about the latest TV episode or your friend’s weekend plans can work wonders for your productivity.

When you work from home or even a library or coffee shop, you miss these social benefits.

So schedule it in. Make appointments with your friends to meet up during the week. Call or FaceTime with them (better than texting because it has a clear start and finish).

Their input will increase your output.

5: Let Life Happen

You will have sick days and stuck days and surprise errand days. The goal isn’t to make a schedule and stick to it perfectly. So when life happens, embrace it and move forward:

  • Can’t log 6 billable hours today? Instead try for 4 or 2 or even 15 minutes. All progress counts and keeps the momentum going for days when the wind is at your back.
  • Feeling overwhelmed? Let yourself take a few mental health hours or even days. Do tasks that have a clear start and end.
  • Feeling stuck in loop? Do you feel the pull to waste time? Give that urge your attention, name it, and let it go. Stand up and walk around a little. At least, stare away from your computer screen and do some breathing meditation for a minute or two.

Conclusion: Learn Your Process

These suggestions represent what has worked well for me. Use them merely as a starting point. At the end of each work day, take a few minutes to reflect on what worked well and where you struggled. Where you had issues, tweak your practice for the next day. After a week or two, if one strategy isn’t working, try a different one.

As you look for additional strategies and ideas, here are the two best books I would recommend:

  • Getting Things Done by David Allen. A little dense at times, you don’t need to apply everything Allen suggests to get a lot of value from it. For me, the most useful was his methodology of how to most effective write and manage your to-dos.
  • Staying Composed by Dale Trumbore. Written with composers in mind, it falls into that larger genre of books on the creative process (like Stephen King’s On Writing or Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit). Trumbore offers dozens of practical, actionable suggests that relate directly to working from home and that will make an impact, regardless of whether you are an artist.

As the amount of time we must work from home seems to be getting longer rather than shorter, I wish you the best of luck! As someone who’s been here already, I can say confidently, you can do it!

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Some Things I’ve Read Recently . . .

. . . and why I’ve liked them:

  • “Sharpen Your Quills!” by Rob Deemer, NewMusicBox. After an introductory blurb about how composers use notation software in their composition process, you then get easily more than a dozen responses on who uses what software and how. A good number of composers have had strong opinions on what tools you should/should not use (piano, notation software, your instrument, etc.), but to my mind, prohibitions on certain tools are more a pedagogical exercise than a practical concern. Thus, I loved reading about the process of all these composers and how it intersected their use of notation programs. The variety of their experiences affirmed the idea that different creators will use tools their own way—that there’s no one right way for the act of composing just as there is no one right way for the style of composition. (By the way, the composers whose process sounded most similar to my own were Kevin Puts and David Little.)
  • “Crossing the Atlantic: A Primer on Euro-American Musical Relations” by Evan Johnson, NewMusicBox. I’m across the Atlantic right now at an international music festival, and it’s interesting to note the differences among my colleagues, too, regardless of their original nationality. One thing this festival has shown me, underscored by Johnson’s article, is that I’m really an American in my sensibilities. (As a side note, it’s been refreshing attending daily colloquiums led by Chris Theofanidis and seeing his understanding of and warmth towards a wide variety of music. In a discipline that has had a recent history of turf battles and parsimoniousness, his generosity is something I aspire to.)
  • Neil’s Carillonairum. Okay, so this isn’t so much an article, but did you know Neil Thornock has an entire page of carillon (bell tower) music, his and others? (Do you even know who Neil Thornock is? If not, you should. I love a lot of his music.) It’s a cool sound and really different.
The Centennial Carillon tower at BYU. (Yes, it always looks that pretty.)
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