User manual

Dorico concepts
Dorico is based on a number of key concepts that come from its design philosophy.
We recommend familiarizing yourself with these concepts, as this will greatly enhance your
ability to work
eciently with Dorico and to navigate more easily through this documentation.
Design philosophy and higher-level concepts
Deep design considerations are required to create a notation software like Dorico, which might
be of particular interest to users familiar with scoring applications. Dorico has a forward-thinking
design that is led by musical concepts rather than computational convenience, and this provides
many
benets.
In most other graphically-orientated scoring applications, the highest-level concept is the staff or
the instrument
denition that creates a staff or staves. When setting up your full score in such
programs, you start by adding the correct number of staves, and you are immediately forced
into making decisions about the layout. This means that you must know in advance whether two
utes share a staff or have their own individual staves, or whether there should be two trumpets
or three. Many of these decisions have signicant effects throughout the process of inputting,
editing, and producing individual instrumental parts.
Typically, every system of a score must contain the same number of staves, even if some
are hidden on particular systems. This requires the user to manage common conventions for
themselves, such as multiple players of the same instrument sharing staves. This can be time-
consuming and is naturally error-prone.
By contrast, Dorico is designed to conform more closely to how music is performed in the real
world and to make the score a exible expression of the practical choices that go into a musical
performance, rather than to make the musical performance subservient to the way the score was
initially prepared.
To that end, the highest-level concept of Dorico is the group of human musicians that performs a
score. A score can be written for one or more groups, for example, a double choir or an orchestra
plus off-stage chamber ensemble, and so on. Each group includes one or more players which
correspond to the humans who play one or more instruments. Players may either be individuals
who play more than one instrument, such as an oboist doubling cor anglais, or groups in which
everyone plays only one instrument, such as eight desks of violinists.
One crucial difference between Dorico and other scoring applications is that the musical content
exists independently of the score layout in which it is viewed.
The actual music played by the group in your score belongs to one or more ows. A ow is
any span of music that stands alone, for example, a whole song, a movement of a sonata or
symphony, a number in a musical show, or even a short scale or exercise. Players might or might
not have any music to play in a given
ow. For example, all the brass players might be omitted
from the slow movement of a classical symphony, or certain players might have nothing to play
in some cues in a movie score. This is no problem as you can combine players in ows in any
combination.
Dorico’s design philosophy provides several benets. Chief among them is its ability to produce
different score layouts that share the same musical content. For example, in the same project
you can create a conductor's score with as many instruments as possible condensed onto a
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Dorico Elements 3.5.12