Composing : Dorico by Joel Irwin

I'd be interested in hearing the techniques used by those who can make an engraving program work like a sequencer. I use MIDI controllers (in DP9) like a WX-5 for winds/brass, HandSonic for hand percussion, and an EV-7 for strings/etc CC's...all with the idea of capturing a musical performance. I get that you'd need to shape the controllers in the engraving program, but what techniques do people use to make this under-a-deadline practical and just...musical?

I have been scoring all my films in Sibelius for the last 5 or 6 years. Controlling the samples are very simple. In many cases, you can tie your MIDI commands to notation. For example, you can do a program change when it sees 'arco' or 'pizz'. In other cases, you can create 'hidden text' such as ~C1,49 to set the value of CC1 to 49. You can even string together a series of midi commands (Sibelius has built in macros) to do things like trumpet 'swells'. Is it as flexible as a DAW? Probably not if you really are the type of "midi geek' who likes to really control your samples. But while I have a DAW (Sonar Professional) scoring in a notation program is much easier and faster for me than doing it with piano rolls (and the notation UI in Sonar continues to be pretty useless IMHO). More importantly, those whom I am mentored by are not audio engineers and can't read piano roll. For me to get feedback from the music educators and teachers, I need to show them scores. And the other benefit though I don't expect to see it very soon, is I don't have to go back and forth between Sonar and Sibelius if I want my score to be played live. For me, a tool is just that - a tool. There are lots of tools to build a house or to play a round of golf. More than one solution exists 'on the playing field'. Last week I scored a short in just over two days with Sibelius. I don't think I would have saved time, if any, doing it in Sonar. I know both products, their benefits and their shortcomings. If I get to a project where Sonar is clearly the tool of choice, I won't hesitate to use it. When an audience hears an orchestral performance, they should not care where the sheet music came from, what it looks like, or what was used to create it. What they care about is how the performance sounds. Same thing is true for a film score. Nowadays, all our tools have facilities to synchronize music to media/film and they can all work with one or more VSTs (simultaneously if necessary) such as Kontakt and the sample sets that work with them.

I guess I'm looking for the "midi geek" solutions to a fast and musical rendition. Just out of curiosity, since I'm happy with my process, but I'm always on the lookout for better ways of doing things. Whether it's a final product, or a mockup you might show to a director before a live session, the musicality and realism of your track/demo is incredibly important. Take, for example, this track of mine called AND SCENE. It's got all sorts of little musical imperfections that are captured from my live MIDI-controllers. I can't imagine replicating something like this in an engraving program, and having it sound as musical. But I'd love to know if it's possible, and how. https://soundcloud.com/jonathanprice/and-scene

Really cool piece - I like it. Of course, the question for me would be, say I wanted to get it played live since its Jazz - either same instrumentation or a fully scored arrangement for different instruments or even a lead sheet? Here is the other thing to consider - the 'target audience'. If you are planning to have a soundtrack on iTunes/CD or use this as you have for marketing where the listener can really hear those nuances that you so excellently put in such as the subtle changes in velocity. Then perhaps the tweaking could be warranted. If this piece is being mixed into a film and as we know possibly lower than we would like to hear or it even if it is left alone and shown in a theatrical setting where the tweaks may not be heard or ignored (as our music supports the action of the film), then we have the same manufacturing purity issue as would Heinz for its Ketchup. How many impurities do you let in? There are occasional bones in solid white Tuna. And finally, I would question the quality of the piece/effort used to produce relative to the customer. Some may disagree with me but I believe that the 'bar' for a studio film in LA is way different than say a Texas indie film. What the difference is has long been debated in this forum. But for example, had you delivered the score without those nuances to a filmmaker here in Houston, this piece would still be loved. In fact, I would suggest that for many of the things we do 'above the quality bar' to further reduce the 'imperfections', most indie filmmakers (at least those here) won't hear the difference or tell the difference. They are so grateful just to get something at the quality level of your piece that really sounds live and not just some audio engineer banging out a synth track which is more of the norm they get. Now my stuff is not at all tweaked to your level and as you know, the sound also depends on the samples that are being used and the samplers. But with that in mind and since we are on sort of a jazz platform, here is a recent piece I did with Sibelius called "Sweat". Keep in mind that what is chosen for reverb/convolution is subjective. www.icompositions.com/music/song.php?sid=215163 I then took the score, modified the instruments slightly for my target performers (so the alto sax lead went to a trumpet player). Now the live recording is not done with studio quality mics - two mid-range (about $1k) Panasonic camcorders were placed on opposite ends of the stage with a third in the audience. All three were unmanned (as I was conducting :) ). The audio mix came from the front two cameras. The performers were introductory Houston Community College jazz ensemble students, not seasoned jazz professionals. Now since the piece started in Sibelius, modification was quick and then all I had to do was print out charts. https://youtu.be/DvLgP91ka6k This was the performance two weeks ago. I actually also had a set of 'lead sheets' for Sweat as well and back last Dec, it was performed at the same college much slower with a vibe & cello playing lead by a more advanced jazz ensemble. So this piece has two electronic and two live arrangements (so far). https://youtu.be/wP_62NR9D6c (By the way, Sweat started as a score written for film and then was expanded and adapted to a jazz idiom) You'll get the idea between the Sibelius electronic recording and the live recording. That should answer your question, I hope.

Cool piece! Good point about copy work. Right now, I have two separate processes for mockups and copying. In order to get a clarinet line that's as musical/realistic, I use my WX-5, and the kind of MIDI data it spits out is nothing you'd want to import into Finale, et. al. So I end up with speedy-entry from my hand-written score, which works, but adds a step. As far as quality, I say always make it the best, regardless of where it's going, or at what level. If you don't, somebody else will. : )

I'm really interested in seeing how Dorico works out for scoring from start to finish. I've actually been using Presonus Notion for my orchestral arrangements. I arrange all of my parts in Notion, the same way you would write for orchestra on paper, and then I export the entire piece as a (.mid) midi file. I then import that midi project into Cubase, and assign all of my parts in my Cubase template to each particular track-channel-instrument. The majority of my orchestral sample library is all VSL based. But I still don't think that intergrating VSL with Notion is as intuitive as it could be. Dorico, on paper, seems like the answer that many composers having been waiting for, using traditional composing methods with professional notation. How well it integrates VST3 plugins is yet to be seen. But if it makes transcribing, midi, and plug-in integration as facile as it claims, that will certainly be my replacement to using Notion.