Dorico 3 drives the state of the art in music notation software forward. Only Dorico 3 can produce a condensed conductor’s score in a single click. Dorico 3 also introduces powerful new features for guitar and harp, sophisticated new playback controls, and much more, wrapped up in a newly-refined and elegant user interface.

Condensing

In a conductor’s score, music for multiple players is condensed onto a smaller number of staves, reducing the number of staves on each page and allowing each staff to be larger, aiding legibility. Producing a conductor’s score has always been laborious and time-consuming, requiring a great deal of planning and revision throughout the whole process, with almost no assistance from software – until now. Dorico 3 introduces the ability to create an intelligently-formatted conductor’s score with a single click, while still maintaining complete and correct instrumental parts. Profound step changes in productivity in music notation software come along perhaps once a decade: this is one of them.

Tablature

Dorico 3 greatly enriches its support for notation for guitar and other fretted instruments. Choose whether to show music for each guitar as staff notation, guitar tab, or both: naturally, changes to the staff notation are automatically reflected in the tab, and vice versa. Edit the tuning of each string, and add or remove strings: Dorico 3 automatically handles fretboards with irregular fret spacing (such as dulcimer), or instruments where one or more strings is shorter than the others (such as banjo). If you choose to show guitar tab on its own, control how rhythms are shown, including support for enclosing half notes (minims) and longer to distinguish them from shorter note values. Idiomatic guitar techniques such as slides, bends, hammer-ons, pull-offs, and harmonics are all elegantly supported.

Guitar Notations

In addition to tablature support, Dorico 3 introduces support for chord diagrams, including a library of hundreds of standard chord shapes, and the ability to quickly and easily design your own. For classical guitar notation, Dorico 3 provides comprehensive support for left- and right-hand fingering, including automatic placement of left-hand fingering within the staff, tucked in with the notes, as seen in the finest engraved publications. And improved string and capo indicators make it easy to provide all the information your performers will need.

Playback Templates

Dorico 3 makes it easier to work with third-party sound libraries and virtual instruments with the introduction of custom playback templates. After you have set up playback for a particular virtual instrument in one project, you can now save that configuration for use in future projects. Create a custom template that uses your favorite dedicated piano virtual instrument, uses strings from your favorite orchestral library, and falls back on the bundled HALion Symphonic Orchestra sounds for everything else. Share your saved configurations with colleagues and other users, with simple drag-and-drop installation. And with expanded capabilities in VST Expression Maps, it’s easier to take advantage of all of the advanced techniques provided by your favourite sample libraries.

Soundiron Olympus Micro

Steinberg is proud to have partnered with one of the world’s leading producers of sample libraries and virtual instruments, Soundiron, to bring their acclaimed choir library Olympus Choir Micro to HALion Sonic SE – and Olympus Choir Micro is included with Dorico 3, providing expressive and realistic mixed voice choir sounds with two syllables (“ooh” and “ah”). If you fall in love with the Olympus Choir Micro sounds, Soundiron will be bringing the advanced version Olympus Choir Elements to HALion soon.

Smart Harp Pedaling

Even composers and arrangers familiar with the technical aspects of writing for the harp will welcome Dorico 3’s new smart harp pedaling features. Check that the music you’re writing is practical for the harpist by having Dorico calculate what pedal settings are required, showing any notes that cannot be played by the current pedals in red. Quickly add your own pedal indications, with a choice of appearance – using either a diagram or note names for each pedal – which are automatically positioned and can be set to appear in either the full score or the harp part, or both.