As I mentioned in my last post about a month ago, I’ve been learning to use new notation software, Dorico. Since the late 1980’s I’ve been mostly using Finale for all my music notation and I’d gotten quite used to it. But now that Finale has been sunset and is longer being supported, I’ve pretty much completely switched to using Dorico instead.

Now that I’ve been using Dorico for a while I’m starting to get more comfortable with using it. I feel that once I’ve got a slightly better handle on it that I’m going to like it better than Finale. Dorico has a number of features that I find superior to Finale. For example, laying out the final parts for printing seems to go much faster than on Finale. Dorico does a much better job of automatically spacing out the staves and avoiding collisions (for the most part). Note entry also works better for me as I can play a chord on my keyboard and Dorico will remember what I just played so I can take my hands off the keyboard and press the rhythmic value on my computer keyboard, which was harder to work with in Finale’s Speedy Note Entry.

I haven’t used Sibelius or Musescore really, so I can’t compare Dorico to those programs, but my recommendation for former Finale users is that Dorico is a good option.

I did go through a couple of Dorico’s tutorials to get started, but I figured the best way to learn how to use the software for my needs was to jump in and complete some projects. After last month’s saxophone quartet commission was completed I began working on a new composition for big band. Here’s a MIDI realization of the completed chart.

So like many of my composition, the title is stupid (Finale was discontinued, so this is called Sunset Finale, get it?). The sound libraries I used in the above demo, however, is pretty cool, I think. I purchased Atomic Big Band Horns to use for all the horn sounds, excepting the solos. While I’ve been having some playback issues with this project that caused some notes to not play long enough or too long, I was able to come up with a workaround for this demo. So all the prewritten horn parts are using the Atomic Big Band Horns sound library, while the rhythm section and soloists are audio exports from Band-in-a-Box and use that software’s samples. It’s a pretty nice end result for a demo recording.

I’ve already sent it to the current music director of the Asheville Jazz Orchestra and we’ll probably debut this chart next month.