Music Software & Interface Design: Steinberg's Dorico

no matter your profession learning to use a new application to do your job can be a painful experience yes the software you're currently using has all kinds of weird quirks and problems especially if it's PowerPoint or Dreamweaver man have you ever used Dreamweaver it's awful it's just awful but the thing about these problems is that over time you learn to overcome them and eventually you develop quite a bit of speed things are fine you can work well enough with what you have and yes some of it is a little annoying but life's not perfect and then along comes some game changer that everyone keeps talking about oh it's so much better oh you still using that old thing it's so out of date so inefficient blah blah blah now if the app is Dreamweaver those people have a point I just can't stress how much I hate Dreamweaver but often the process of moving to the new thing is really really painful and you just end up with a whole bunch of new problems to overcome this all boils down to one question how much suffering is involved and is the change worth that suffering it's a two-part question now in the world of composition the industry leader Sibelius is the ultimate trial by fire understanding it is a bit like learning to drive a new route to work while blindfolded your experience and intuition aren't gonna help you instead you need to rely on brute force trial and error by simply crushing into everything around you in order to piece together a mental construct of what's going on with your primary guides being abstract causality and pain it should be renamed pavlovas so for all of us who've had to endure the process of divining the mechanics of Sibelius we don't want to do it again we're survivors yeah it's a nightmare to learn it took me years to get good at it but despite the awful interface it is actually quite powerful and eventually eventually you get to be pretty quick at it too it's fine leave it it's fine but it's not fine not any more because there's a new app on the scene a direct competitor hell-bent on running the Sibelius folk out of who are you I'm Jack man and you're gonna be seeing me a little later [Music] [Music] and everybody and thank you for tuning in to today's livestream about Doric o3 my name is Daniel spread Breanna this is Daniel spread Brie he's pretty much the spokesperson of Darko and to begin looking at what he and the rest of his team have built let's go back a few years to 2012 when the majority of that team were working on a different notation app called Sibelius right I've already spoken about this once before so let's recap quickly Sibelius was bought by a multimedia company called avid in 2006 Daniel spread berry and the rest of the Sibelius team were based in Finsbury Park in London at the time but a few years after they purchased Sibelius had run into some financial trouble with their share price tanking at the end of 2011 so as part of an emergency cost-saving measure they decided to let the Finsbury Park team go and began recruiting a new and much cheaper team in the Ukraine then three years later the Ukraine team seems to have not worked out and Sibelius started advertising for yet another development team in Montreal as Tim Carl Evans vice-president for audio products explained it became clear that in order to move forward we needed to have a specific skill set for our main development team excellent developer skills plus both of background and passion for the art of music notation or to put it another way it turns out we needed that people we fired the closing of the Finsbury Park office caught the attention of Yamaha who saw an opportunity you see Avid's revenue has been slowly declining for years now with its two other moneymakers ProTools and Media Composer facing increasingly stiff competition Sibelius on the other hand is still solidly the industry standard for notation and has a pretty firm footing in the education space too which makes it difficult to displace and since it integrates with Pro Tools it's attractive to those who write music for movies or TV or who want to convert their scores into highly produced audio tracks however for those bought into the Sibelius Pro Tools ecosystem there are some cause for concern our avid destined to continue this trajectory of decline and if so given that they were willing to massively halt its development once would they do it again is Sibelius safe well Yamaha are also asking this question they own a company called Steinberg who in turn owned Cubase a direct competitor to Pro Tools and since they're obviously always looking for a way to give Cubase an edge when avid decided to ditch the Finsbury Park team in 2012 they saw an opportunity here offered up in a platter was a group of people with the experience to develop a rival notation program which could integrate with Cubase and together could be poised to step in as the new industry standard if Avid's fortunes continued to deteriorate Darko was never gonna suddenly take over from Sibelius No there's a longer game being played here so before we go any further you might be wondering why I've not yet mentioned the other two major notation apps finale and new scoring well with regards to finale which is still Sebelius's main rival I'm saving it for last and I don't want to give the game away by talking about it now regarding new score well that's a bit more of an interesting one actually and if you haven't already heard the news about this I guess you'll be pretty surprised so after I created my video about musescore in March 2019 the open source community set about fixing all the issues I had mentioned I was quite impressed and honored by this and over time I found myself regularly talking to them about the specifics of certain fixes eventually I started submitting proper designs too and as I got more involved I discovered that I got along really well with the team so one thing led to another we started holding hands we dated for a while and on the fifth of November 2019 finally decided to tie the knot and I became new scores new head of design I know what a match so now that I'm actively working on the design of musescore I feel there are two obvious questions I should quickly address first what does this mean for the Tentacruel channel well in terms of output nothing if I do cover my work on music or here in the future it'll only be when I think the subject is interesting enough for a general audience and are largely be documenting my design work over on the musescore channel instead so for anyone interested in following that progress the link is in the description the second question that I imagine this will raise is whether or not my involvement with musescore will bias my appraisal of derecho or finale I mean it's a fair question and it's probably worth describing my own motivations here I joined musescore so I could put my money where my mouth is to design a notation aft to be the way I think it should be and the last thing I want to do in pursuit of that goal is to start engaging in cringe-worthy us-and-them corporate tribalism of the Steve Ballmer variety Steve Jobs goes to Macworld inning and pulls out this I found what was your first reaction when you saw that [Music] five hundred dollars fully subsidized with the plan I said that is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine if I start failing to recognize the good work of those around me how good is my work gonna be so I'm gonna proceed exactly as I have before when I see something I like I'll say so and when I see something janky I'm gonna mercilessly market as always and as you watch this video you can judge for yourselves whether you think I'm being fair or not and with all that said let's get back into it the Darko team have a tendency to irritate those who currently work on Sibelius and it's not hard to see why nearly every article about Darko or interview with one of their team members will mention the Finsbury Park incident although to be fair it's hard to see how that subject can be avoided but that's not all Sibelius seems to come up a lot when team members describe the design of Darko - with the sentiment being look how badly they do things I've linked to a few examples of this in the description the funny thing about this though is that since they are the old Sibelius team then there are two significant degree responsible for this badness bear in mind by the way that this is the team who brought us the awful ribbon design with Sibelius 7 a legacy that the current Sibelius team are rather unfairly saddled with so with that said what is this video gonna focus on well I've spent the last eight months using Darko properly unlike my previous music software videos I think it offers up a lot of interesting lessons about the challenges of creating music software and I've made sure to focus on aspects I've not spoken about before for those who can't read music this video should still be pretty straightforward to understand for those interested in my overall assessment of Darko I'm gonna be putting it head-to-head against Sibelius to see which is better and as I go through this video I'm going to answer the crucial question which would I pick to write music in so as I mentioned earlier Darko spends a lot of time positioning itself as a more elite notation program than Sibelius and they reinforce this message constantly in interviews tutorials press releases and blog posts the look and layout of the app tries to convey this message to sometimes literally I mean the very first thing you see when you open Darko is the tagline advanced music notation system the UI is dark by default which reminds me of a design adage use white if you want to look easy and non-threatening use black if you want to look pro that came to be intuitive and simple to use so I was curious to see what they've done to improve upon the Sibelius model and to help me answer this I decided to try something I've not done before in this channel in October 2000 19 I sent out a call on patreon YouTube and Twitter asking experienced musicians to help me do some user testing after receiving hundreds of responses I chose 25 people who'd never used Darko before and asked them to one download and install the trial version and to try writing a few bars of music using whatever instruments and styles they work um with I am quite comfortable using Sibelius I've never used Oracle before though I've been really excited to try so now I now again I'm stuck at this point where I need I need more bars it's killing me this is the ultimate test for any application the first time user tests it doesn't indicate how good an app is once you've learned it and will definitely get to that later but it does directly test how intuitive it is and for anyone interested these sessions typically lasted about an hour so why did I focus on this type of testing well firstly this is a video about design and I wanted to show one of the tools designers use to validate their work secondly the first time user test is extremely important to pass for any app competing in a crowded market why well because when people decide to install your free trial that's your opportunity to convince them that it's worth making the jump from what they are currently using to what you were offering on every complication every bit of jank they encounter along the way during this crucial period is more likely to convince them that it's just not worth doing an in Darko's case considering that it's aggressively targeting Sibelius and finale users a bad first-time experience is really hurtful to their chances also this is the best test you can use to determine if something is well-designed because every time an app requires you to consult the manual to figure out how to do something especially when other apps already make that thing easy it's not doing a particularly good job now the experience of those I recorded largely matched my own first time experience which is mixed and in places pretty painful so strap in people because even though there's a lot of good stuff to discuss later we first need to talk about the setup process okay are you ready for the pain right to begin using a trial of Darko 3 you need to create a Steinberg ID by entering your email and password and right off the bat we have a usability issue the title says sign in or create your Steinberg ID and at the bottom you have what looks like a confirm button now most people foolishly understood this to mean that you should enter your email here and your password there and press create Steinberg ID lovely and you'll need to fill that out again for what it's worth most participants did this step before speaking to me so I only saw what happened four times and out of those four times three people made this mistake and once you've registered they email you a code which just about everyone copies I cannot paste in here then after hitting the redundant continue button you're taken to this doozy confirm newsletter subscription with the following options cancel or confirm watching people encountering this step was pretty amusing there is no choice what time of trial is this it just rubs me the wrong way that's just that's the I'm not fun because obviously the first thing I'm gonna do is unsubscribe then they send you an activation code which contains hidden curse words and you also get your download link you're one step away I should probably tell you at this point that you're nowhere near one step away you're like 20 percent way through this so the download link doesn't actually download derecho instead you get the Steinberg download assistant a landing page which finally allows you to download derecho along with the orchestral libraries that come with it and when installing the download assistant it asks you whether you want to install something called the area 2 download manager a download manager which they explained makes your download assistant work better anyway once that's all set up you can finally click on Jericho 3 to download it once installed you click on the dark hole icon to open it and it tells you no license found which is one of those messages that makes you think oh no I've done something wrong click enter activation code to launch elicenser control center and enter your activation code and there's a button which when pressed opens a program called the elicenser which it turns out they installed on your machine without telling you and if you're on Windows they also auto created a desktop shortcut to okay looks like you got some spring cleaning to do after this so you go back to your email grab your activation code and enter it then you press activate license only to be told that the elicenser is out of date what but hold on I just installed it how did I mess this up now a few people didn't know what to do at this point and it's worth mentioning that this was experienced universally by every person I spoke to and it took some of them a long time to realize that the only solution to this problem is to follow the address mentioned in the error message here WWWE licensure net and they don't even make it a link it would be nice you know if that was a link so I didn't have to type it out so then you download the latest version of the elicenser thanks for nothing Steinberg download assistant and then you install it and a what now applications still active on this computer are using the elicenser software please close these applications and then continue installing by clicking retry so guess which application is causing the issue that's right it's derecho the program that launched the elicenser in the first place is now preventing it from working what's the opposite of seamless seem full okay so that was a train wreck at this point I should mention that I started off interviewing 28 people and three of them dropped out specifically because his installation was too awkward for them of the 25 remaining people only three described it as straightforward okay to be fair this is the steinberg team in Hamburg's doing not the derecho team in London at the moment this tacked together a series of mishaps is hobbling the first time experience of derecho anyway let's leave that all behind and opened our co-op and were brought to the Steinbrueck hub which is fine a bit disorganized and fugly I particularly love this vile green button over here this is a classic UI trick if people don't notice an important button just make it more horrible and dark oh can we talk can we talk about this Coldplay you're angling to be the creme de la creme of notation apps and you're leading with Coldplay oh and it's that song clocks the one where they discovered arpeggios who is your audience for this I mean if you had a pop song by I don't know David Bowie let's just create a little Venn diagram here I can see there being a lot of crossover with Darko users but if we were to change it to people who have a rudimentary understanding of music and people who like Coldplay I think let's just push those out of it yeah yeah that feels about right Coldplay seriously you may as well have led with Chocolate Rain but all that aside now at least were in derecho although we're still not really done with the installation because next comes the audio setup like many other composers who write for live ensembles I'm a die-hard fan of the orchestral emulator note performer which I could go on about at length no performer can be easily set up as the default sound library in both Sibelius and finale but with derecho it's a different story so first you go to the play category and press this plus button under the MT VST instruments panel then I can pick No performer from the drop-down which in turn triggers a pop-up that's been built specifically to explain what to do because there's no way you'd ever figure it out so I have to go to play and choose no performer from the playback template and what's this hieroglyphic is it a sound wave or something show factory that's meant to be a factory hey guys the deadline is today and we need a factory icon pronto yeah no problem leave it to me I'll just make the door and the two things on the thing and and and and factory next I have to go to a completely different place to make that template work by default even then if you press play it might not work so it tells you specifically that you have to rewind it to the beginning first and then press play this is a novel way to fix usability bugs just don't fix them and provide an inbuilt pop-up that tells you how to work around it by the way I'm making this seem way more straightforward and linear than it was I spent a lot of time working all this out especially because the play option up here is only available when you're in the play category a really opaque clutter saving technique so what would be the ideal here well how about when Darko is opened it searches for no performer and if it finds it it triggers the following pop-up we see you have no performer installed would you like to activate it for this project and then simply provide them with an option to set it as the default right there too and as for that last step the one where I have to rewind to the start first since none of the competition does that I think Darko should fix whatever they need to fix to stop it from happening the can't claim to be an intuitive app if they require four steps to do what Sibelius can accomplish in one and just to finish up with this for anyone thinking of installing the trial version I should probably issued these two warnings first derecho by default likes to hug all the audio for itself preventing other apps that make sound from working properly this caused me quite a few headaches during user testing because the act of booting up derecho caused our video conference calls to crash I don't know if you can hear me or not but I can no longer hear you not cool derecho the setting to turn this off is in preferences play then scroll down to turn off this miserable little tick box you're welcome secondly if you try to open Darko before your sound library is installed it will default to something called Darko beep which is a basic sampler that is so distorted and set to such an insanely loud volume that it might take your head off if careful watch this poor unsuspecting soul pressing play and Darko for the first time with headphones on called play clacks all right and I'm just gonna press play holy [Music] so next up our testers needed to set up their score by choosing the instruments they wanted to write for now all the major players provide an instruments pop-up which allows you to do this right away make sense but the Darko team have altered this idea a little by introducing the concept of players which are meant to represent the actual people who'll be playing the piece with each player needing to be assigned to their own instrument this is reminiscent of an old app from the 90s called Igor engraver which had a similar list called musicians there are good reasons for doing this first it provides a framework that allows you to assign more than one instrument to an individual player for example if you have a percussionist in charge of multiple instruments you can set that up here this is also a structurally useful - by creating this identifiable list which is a set not of instruments but of the people who are holding those instruments they've unlocked some very powerful score creation and layout possibilities which we'll get to shortly but the drawback of this system is that it creates a complication that makes the process of setting up a score more cumbersome and difficult to understand first it forces new users to have to engage with the awkward concept of having an empty handed player in their project which I watched stress a few people out I didn't understand it in it got in the way and it's only when I'm watching this video back then I now understand where I went wrong another problem I saw was the following after you choose an instrument the instrument panel closes Oh what do you do now well a lot of people look at these hieroglyphics down here person people Mecca rainbow CD rack and understandably steer clear of them so instead a lot of people clicked on this pretty inviting plus button here since it's the thing that best describes their intention I want to add something the problem is that by doing this you're actually assigning this player another instrument which is a concept first time users don't yet understand what happened to the violin and piano because it seems like I only have trumpet on my score yeah apparently I'm doing something wrong another issue this creates is that it makes the process of setting up a non-standard orchestral ensemble much slower than finale or Sibelius with finale for example when I want to start a new project a dialog appears where I can quickly choose all my instruments by pressing this but which are automatically arranged into a sensible default ordering woodwinds at the top strings at the bottom etc with Darko the concept of needing to add a player first before signing them an instrument slows things down and since this dialogue keeps disappearing after you add players you very quickly find yourself wondering is there a way I can add multiple players and not have to do this one by one and then you look down here and you'd be forgiven for thinking that this is the option that allows you to do that nope this is something called a section player which refers to a section of musicians all reading from the same staff like a string section so this is a further complication we're no longer just looking at a list of players it's a list of players where one of them is itself a group of more players so if you want to add multiple players who all play different instruments that's what the mecca rainbow is for the icon is meant to be an ensemble seating chart by the way congrats if you figure that out but even this is inflexible only allowing you to choose from a few types of grouping I'm gonna try and do a piano quintet okay I guess it doesn't do quintet by default for the orchestral piece I wrote in Darko I wanted to alter sax and one tenor sax which I could kind of get along with a bunch of additional instruments I didn't want so I added this list then deleted all the unneeded instruments then added the missing second alto sax player no big deal but it does feel quite slow compared to the competition and by the time I'd finished the instruments were arranged completely incorrectly too so I had to drag them around into a sensible order manually not to mention after I'd finished adding instruments look at the state of the score so again unlike Sibelius which automatically tries to pick a sensible default layout I have to now go on the hunt for the settings which allow me to change the staff and paper size here's another minor annoyance that can be illustrated by watching this user coming to grips with instrument setup he's now trying to delete some unwanted players and this annoying dialog keeps popping up each time to ask whether he wants to delete the player or the player and apart layouts but the thing is he's only trying to delete an empty handed player so any parts assigned to them are going to be empty it feels like a fairly unnecessary and semi abstract question to be presenting him with at this moment here's another user engaging with this dialog for the first time who opt only to delete the player because the options being put in front of him aren't clear yeah there's no music written yet so that's fine can delete that one as a consequence he now has an orphaned part over here that's going to cause some confusion down the road oh man I haven't even got to this panel yet right let's mosey on over here so this list on first glance looks like the same thing but no let me quickly explain what it is this is the layouts panel which is a list of the scores and part scores that have been auto-generated as you were adding players over here this is also a concept from Igor engraver which has been reimagined derecho and let me be clear here this idea is great the Darko team were right to take inspiration from Igor but their version does involve some very unusual behavior for example if I click on the flute player over here we can see tick boxes in the layout panel on the right which are showing the scores where the flute is being applied in this case the full score and the individual flute part and if I want the flute to be added to anything else I can just tick it for example I've now added the flute player to this oboe part ok so far but now if I click on a score in this list the arrangement reverses now the score is selected and these instruments become tick boxes which basically means that there are two reversed ways of doing the same thing it's really strange especially because the panels are on either side of the screen so it's not visually obvious they're connected in any way and you have to keep ping pong in back and forth to understand the relationship between them and this setup has some other weird knock-on effects too like if you arrange the instruments into a sensible order on one side the other side doesn't follow suit so the connections are all over the place look bassoon one over here bassoon 2 over here horn all the way down here the shame about this is the options being provided are really powerful because you can create as many variations of parts as you want like if you're writing for piano trio and the cellist tells you they want to see the piano in their part score you could just click on the piano and add it to the cello score right away or click on the cello score and add the piano whatever but as I said earlier when you arrive at the app for the first time all of this all these bizarre icons and interrelationships smack you in the face at once it's baffling and don't even get me started about this down here flows a way of creating sections or movements or variation I don't want to get into it too much right now it's another nice idea which when clicked on reveals oh no a three-way relationship ah and what I find particularly strange about this whole setup page is that despite having an entire section devoted to setting up your score it's missing some really essential stuff like staff and paper size which you will remember from a moment ago you're definitely going to have to edit if you're creating an orchestral score oddly if I expand one of these you can see the page size referenced but you can't actually edit it y-you can look but you can't touch so if you want to change these settings you have to right click here and choose layout options to open this dialog box if you change a layout size you have to then close the dialog and navigate to the score itself to see the effect of the changes you've made this is particularly jarring because Sibelius does this much better look I can change the staff size here on the score updates accordingly overall the interconnectedness of this system is not obvious at all and the only way to learn it is to watch a lot of tutorial videos and just so you know as a designer you generally want to avoid that especially for core functionality for this kind of stuff every time the user needs to consult the manual it is kind of a failure of design the system is very clever but also in elegant and quite cumbersome and as a result Darko is not an app that suddenly clicks it's an app that slowly dawns on you over time so regarding score setup are these pain points unavoidable does the inclusion of all these clever ideas mean that the app has to naturally be harder to learn well I'm sure it won't surprise you to find out that I think the answer is no I think some of this information could be sequenced so that the user isn't hit with all of it at once we have a structural problem to solve first this interconnected ping-pong layout is hampering the ability to provide other useful settings and is also causing the player's panel to be over complicated especially the way you have to keep reopening the same dialogue when you have to keep doing that it may as well be a dialogue so let's remove players from here and instead when a user starts a new project will show a dialog that places the instruments on the left and the players on the right now anyone come in from one of the competitor apps which is the audience Darko is targeting by the way we'll know exactly what the deal is you can select instruments and add them quickly and each time you do this a new player is automatically created allowing us to discard the confusing concept of an empty handed player and if you want to add more instruments to the same player or change the instrument they are holding you can drag them into these slots this would allow you to change instruments later too and regarding the ordering you'll notice that the instruments have been organized sensibly by default and you can still drag to rearrange them if you want and once you've finished you can close this dialog and then you're left with just one list which is the list of parts why would I do this well let me demonstrate first if you click on a part now the appropriate score appears in front of you and if you want to edit the number of players in that score they can be immediately accessed from this subordinate list or the relationship between players and parts is much clearer moreover now that you have this pattern you can use tabs to expose useful common settings like staff and page sizes the difference is unlike the existing dialog box where you change these values the score updates to reflect them immediately all in all a much friendlier system the information is sequenced sensibly options are exposed when you need them and crucially you can see the effect of the changes you make to the settings not to mention because we've decluttered the page it's less likely to make your head spin and you can see more of the score there are a few more bits of hooking up to do like making the players dialog easy to find I'm connecting it to flows etc those are fairly straightforward to solve using similar solutions I think you get the idea so let's move on now finally we get to the part where our testers were ready to write some music everything we've been looking at so far was contained in the setup tab but in order to write music you now need to move over to the right tab and when you do this the app changes significantly for the better gone are the esoteric interconnected lists and instead appears what looks like a pretty sensible and intuitive layout this was my first impression when I use dark oak and the people I tested largely agreed here's one person describing the layout after seeing it for the first time if this looks this looks nice and simple first impression is pretty good I got my note input on the left hand side other stuff on the right hand side seems nice and clean I like that if you're a designer it's exactly what you want to hear he doesn't know precisely what he'll find in either side of the page but he has a pretty good idea of the general organization without having to think too deeply about it this side is concerned writing music this site contains markings and techniques that you can apply to that music and when you select stuff on the score you can choose a few contextual options down here this time around there doesn't appear to be any interconnected functionality on either side of the score any linked controls like these two parts are situated beside each other which helps and the connection was obvious to everyone I tested and there's some lovely visual and organizational subtlety here too in this panel they've laid out the most common note durations accidentals and articulations with clear separator lines that make it very easy to read I also really like this panel on the right each collection of elements is represented by a clear icon and the contents of each section is organized in a way that makes it really intuitive and it works in lots of different ways too for example if you're the kind of person who likes to click on something first and then apply it you can or if you prefer to select the destination first and make your selection afterwards you can do that too and the impact this design finesse had on first-time usage was evident no one failed to figure out how to apply things to the score and with a few exceptions people generally didn't get lost once they got to this page I also really liked how many extended techniques and modern notation concepts you find here not only is it convenient but also educational for new composers and I wouldn't be surprised if many people ended up discovering and using these techniques simply by virtue of exploring this app there is one quite painful issue I'd love to see addressed which is how hard they make it to add bars when you get started you see when you start a new project you get what looks like one bar what you don't realize is that this isn't really a bar at all it's infinite and no matter how many notes you add you can never get to a new bar moreover you can't create a new bar despite there being a very clear option for it so the trick here is to add a time signature first unless you figured that out you're going nowhere why they don't disable this button when it doesn't do anything is beyond me better yet why not just ask them to specify a time signature at that point half the people I tested had this specific issue and I can't understand why they don't smooth it out now this complaint might make experience the user has grown but it's a first time user trap it is logical but you only see that logic when you're on the other side of the problem and another consequence of this is that when users first try to enter some notes the fact that this really is an infinite bar causes the subdivision markings to function quite poorly and results in the user accidentally entering wrong note values it's an awful first experience if you don't think to add a time signature at the outset the nostril quavers ask for crotchets so suddenly this changed to a different note I didn't want this note now insane all of this I shouldn't gloss over the fact that this initial State you find yourself in is actually a very permissive system if you want to write music that's free of any meter which for many composers interested in modern techniques from the 20th or 21st century is a big deal and lots more it's been built to work this way unlike Sibelius where any free metered solution always feels like a hack however I think the option to write free metered music should be opted in and certainly not the default but definitely kudos to the Darko team for building a system that facilitates it if you're interested in learning more about this I've put a link to a relevant tutorial in the description below okay I should probably address this faint gray rectangle you see everywhere oh you know what let's not right now let's just pop it down here and we'll get to it later so with all that said what's it like writing music on the score well regarding basic note input it works in a pretty standard way you click on a note value and enter it on the score or you can enter notes using a computer keyboard or MIDI keyboard in addition they provide a marking above the stage that describes how the beat is subdivided so far so good but once you look a little closer Darko's system does some very strange things and accounts simply be explained by listing out each feature in isolation because here again they've linked together certain functionalities for reasons that are initially tricky to understand it all seems to hang on one or two hard rules which seem like lines in the sand that they refuse to cross with the rest of the interaction model being a collection of workarounds that solve the awkward consequences of those rules let me show you what I mean so the most obvious rule is that notation should always appear correctly on the score now right away we can see why this rule is so compelling who's going to advocate for in correctness and to give an example of how this rule is realized let's select a quarter note and place it here before the strong beat and you can see that now d'arco has created two tied eighth notes which is correct now the second rule is more a consequence of the way d'arco is built and I'll need to do some explaining before it will make sense you see d'arco has a particular way of storing notes that differs from Sibelius with Sibelius there's a strict structural hierarchy going on with notes belonging to bars bars belonging to staffs staffs belonging to instruments at cetera d'arco isn't structured this way their note durations are stored independent of bars which is why they can achieve things like allowing tuplets to cross bar lines something Sibelius frustratingly does not support to illustrate this here's a few bars in 6/8 if we place a dotted quarter note here watch what happens when I use a shortcut to move it to the right by one subdivision now we can see that Darko has applied the first rule altering it so that the notation conforms to standard Convention and what we're looking at now appears to be a quarter note a tie and then an eighth note but if we click on one of these elements we can see that they're actually all linked together and that Darko isn't classifying them that way it's still representing them as one dotted quarter note in the UI which means that it considers this highlighted group to be a single duration now that I've explained this I can articulate their second interaction rule which I'm gonna call duration is king these aren't individual durations tied together they are one duration and if I click on any of them only that overall duration will be reflected in the UI and I suppose again this seems very logical but when it comes to writing quickly these two rules have some really annoying consequences where Darko's Corrections actually become obstructions and remember that question I asked at the beginning of this video how much suffering is involved well that's what I'm about to show you now a bunch of seemingly insignificant issues that really add up as you encountered them hundreds if not thousands of times in a single score okay so here I'm copying this little flourish and I want it to be placed on the last eighth note of this bar in Sibelius I can do this by clicking on that rest and changing it to a smaller subdivision so I can quickly select this last rest eighth note and paste it here then I just need to clean up those first two rests again and then I'm done with Torico I can't do this because you guessed it it's really sloppy to allow multiple eighth note rests like this in Finnish music so they disallow it completely instead we need to choose a workaround one way is to add a dud note first and then select the final rest paste in your music then go back and delete the dud note but the solution derecho recommends is to paste the flourish here and then use the shortcut alt command right on the Mac to shift it over to spaces but again this is slower and depending on the particular usually requires a little bit of thinking and additional problem solving another major pain is how ties are handled so because the d'arco team wants us to understand how the app internally handles note durations if you select a tie you automatically select the note it's connected to which is okay but they've decided to go all in with this idea by completely preventing you from selecting any of the notes or ties individually and because of this you keep coming across these little mini puzzles like I want this note to cover these are two rests so right these add up to a half note so okay a dotted half note will do it like a grade three refresher test in Sibelius I can just select the last note and extend it this is particularly useful when you end up in a situation like this in this case I want to extend the duration to fill that last rest you a dotted half note isn't gonna get you out of this one is it at this point the only thing you can do in Darko is to fiddle with this duration toggle down here and use a shortcut to extend the length of this duration by that amount yes to have the answer but it's a slow answer as for ties you can't delete them without deleting all the other notes - why do I care so much about being able to delete ties well because being a composer are not an engraver my score is an evolving document and I change my mind a lot here in Sibelius if I want to have this as a separate note I just select the tie and delete it then change the note in derecho no such luck you could learn another shortcut holding alt and shift and pressing the left arrow key to reduce the duration and then you have to just rewrite the note but this isn't good enough because it compounds the work you have to do if there are multiple tied notes so recognizing this d'arco created another button called the scissors which when you press it deletes all the selected ties which feels a bit like a nuclear option look if I wanted to split this group of I mean this single duration in the middle I need two scissors all the ties away then we add them here then we add them here in Sibelius I delete that done now I'm all for a consistency but this particular refusal to allow users to select ties and delete them comes across as obstinacy and I sometimes wonder if the Torico team weren't suffering a little from let's be different syndrome to distinguish them from Sibelius or finale I don't know it just doesn't feel like a feature it feels like a pain a scissor a pain here's another consequence of Darko correcta fiying your score say you're right in a piece with very specific dynamic instructions for example offsetting dynamics played over long durations on multiple instruments like this which is common in spectral music well best practice is to split the tied notes into unconventional groupings when needed in order to specify exactly where the dynamics begin and end left by itself the system I've described so far would make this impossible to achieve so recognizing this derecho created a new button called force duration which allows me to lock a duration so it won't be automatically corrected here I've copied and pasted the dynamic timings that I want and now I need to set the durations to match those timings and wait until you see how much faff is involved in this first I have to use the scissors which removes all the ties then I split this so I have a quarter note on the fourth beat where the fortissimo dynamic is positioned so I click on the first note and press the tie button twice to extend it bear in mind that if I press it again at this point it would recombine everything in this bar all over again so now I need to make this quarter note stay here and not go away so I select it and then apply the force duration button here finally I press the tie button a few more times to link it all back together again when you're familiar with the Sibelius workflow this is difficult to be satisfied with with Sibelius I just changed the durations to be the way I want them to be and reapply any ties I lose along the way and I just tidy up any loose ends afterwards no special modes needed the tidy knob doesn't bother me because it's faster and I don't need to formulate a game plan in advance and this brings me to one visual criticism I have of Darko this panel with its collection of buttons that are styled identically but which work in very different ways generally speaking it's a good idea to differentiate things visually to indicate differences in function to give a blunt example switches turn things on and off checkboxes are conditions and buttons are usually reserved for actions you can be more subtle than this by having different sizes or Arrangements but here well this first button is a condition that alters notes before or after you placed them on the score this rest button is a condition that can only be applied to this core but you can't convert a note to a rest afterwards which is weird this chord button is an on/off setting this top let button is an action that can only be applied to something already on the score this grace note button is a condition that applies to the selected duration but often doesn't do anything and then turns off for reasons I can't figure out the input mode and luck to duration buttons are on/off settings input mode deactivates cord mode by the way so watch out for that then there are our old friends force duration and cut which are actions that can only be applied to notes that are already on the score although force duration can be unapplied whereas cut is one and done the tie button is an action that only applies to notes on the score and saving the best for last there select the on/off setting that makes these buttons not work in testing I watched people flounder around with this panel over and over again why because it's a disparate collection of on/off toggles conditions and actions which are all identical looking yet which work in completely different ways the communication sets up expectations that contradicts the actual logic and speaking for myself even though I've been using derecho everyday for over eight months and have written a full orchestral piece in it not to mention the fact that I've watched a gazillion tutorials about it and read God knows how many forum posts and articles about it this panel still manages to wrong-foot me nearly every time I use it here I'm selecting a dot addressed which causes the rest and dot buttons to be highlighted which makes sense but trying to alter the duration doesn't do anything as a result you end up with two different durations selected at the same time worse I can turn off the dotted duration button which doesn't make any sense because again Darko prevents it from having any effect if I press the rest button Darko resets everything now if I deselect the rest the rest button turns off as expected but the dotted note button turns back on remembering a previous state before I selected the rest it's mad and although there is logic behind it it doesn't work very well in practice this whole console is rife with confusing behaviors like these which feel sloppy and inconsistent their communication errors watch how much this one user struggles with them left hands so I have to select feature go right here yeah so I can add a note why can't I put a note do I have to I have to turn on this which I can I think and this feature what and what now I have to click this free chicken what is this do no okay I think I goofed something up no no no no I just want to write something into the left hand down here wider why won't it let me okay after seeing all of that I guess you're gonna come to the conclusion that I hate Darko but that's not the case at all let me now talk about some things I really love so in each video I release about music software I try to include new aspects of interface design that I haven't mentioned before and derecho I think is the perfect app to help discuss an aspect of score creation software that I find very interesting which is how interactive notation actually works so as you probably know for all the major players notation is displayed using vector graphics rather than a raster format like PNG that is to say that they're drawn as a series of 2d points connected by lines and curves rather than as a series of finite pixels the advantage of this is that like text in a word processing app notation can be scaled up or down without any loss of quality making it ideal for printing however notes aren't stored as single vector objects like this because if you wanted the height of a note to be altered the only way you could do it would be to stretch the vector which would warp its proportions and look awful or you'd have to create hundreds of nearly identical looking versions of the same thing all with slightly different heights to try and account for every possibility which would be ludicrously impractical on top of that beams need to be very flexible moving in a direction that complements the direction of the note sequence and needing to be able to cross staves so to help achieve this elements like this note are made up of individual parts you have the parts that don't scale at all in this case the note head and the flag and then you have a rectangle drawn in code which is the only part that actually gets bigger or smaller so if we place an eighth note here the flags have been removed and a vector rectangle is drawn from this position to this position incidentally if you look closely at the notation in Sibelius you can make out all the seams where these parts connect to each other another problem with notation is the wide variety of different sizes and spacing rules that for example let's look at this sharp accidental which is centered horizontally to the note head it applies to which is a very simple rule flat accidentals however don't work like this and have an ascender that rises far beyond the height of a sharp if you were to apply the same centering rule to this it would look completely off especially if we have another note down here now it's ambiguous which note the flat applies to one solution would be to apply an offset to all flat accidentals so it's always a certain number of millimeters higher relative to the note it applies to okay that works but you run into a problem when the user changes to staff size to be bigger or smaller then you need to calculate the offset given the percentage change in size and this becomes even more complicated if the user decides to do something like widen the distance between bar lines if this was limited to only a few objects it wouldn't cost too much of a headache for a developer to implement but with notation there are hundreds of commonly used elements all with their own unique spacing rules for example look at these different articulations here we can see the common base line they've all been aligned too but if you flip the notes around the rules can't simply be flipped with them now the distances are completely different and there's no longer a unified alignment not to mention this mark arrow symbol doesn't flip at all by default trying to specify what would probably amount to thousands of different offsets to get everything looking right and then forcing the program to calculate how those offsets should scale when the score changes size would be incredibly slow going so to help drastically reduce this complication notation apps took inspiration from how word processing applications displayed typography which is if you think about it another complex set of symbols with subtle spacing relationships and the biggest component of this was to utilize the technology that packages characters together that is to say the solution was to use fonts the first of these was called sonata created by Cleo Huggins for Adobe in 1985 Sibelius's default font called opus was created by one of its founders Jonathan Finn in 1993 the advantage of using a font to display notation is that you can set the precise position of each symbol relative to a common baseline and if you look at this sharpen this flat symbol in Illustrator you can see that there's a common baseline for both which means that there's no need for individual offsets the same goes for these articulations too this is the ideal for production because engraving specialists can the exact positioning of symbols in the font itself and when they're placed in the digital score a lot of this positioning nuance comes for free the only problem with the system right now is that there's no consistency between applications which all have unique fonts which contain different systems for how they store notation so unlike ordinary fonts where there's a standardized mapping that everyone uses which means you can simply install one and use it elsewhere choosing a font in a notation app today often requires a lot of specialized fiddling so with all this in mind I want to talk about two of Daniels spread breeze most notable contributions not just to derecho but to the wider notation community the first is called a standard music font layout or smooth fill which was set up to overcome the existing disarray where each app has its own rules specifying how notation should be arranged in a font which prevents them from being usable elsewhere smoothly makes use of Unicode to assign each notated element a specific unchanging number the main advantage of this is that you can have thousands of symbols all in one font which overcomes the problem you see with Sibelius where opus is actually split into 18 different fonts because they kept running out of space this system is now used by quite a few notation apps including musescore Daniel spread breeze second big contribution was the first smoothly font called bravura which is available for free under the sial open font license incidentally due to this bravura is also packaged with musescore I personally love bravura because it gives Darko a unique striking appearance the main inspiration for it comes from a notation system called not a set which was popular before programs like Sibelius came to the fore the NADA set system was a clear set of plastic sheets covered in musical symbols which engravers transferred to paper by rubbing them carefully with a spatula and although there are other fonts inspired by the not a set system like maestro which comes with finale bravura has a much thicker almost inky looking appearance this is due to Daniel spread buri wanting it to look like older printed music and he could see this idea clearly when comparing it with maestro maestro has a lot of sharp angles whereas before edges are rounded to mimic the appearance of ink pressed on paper which spreads out slightly before fully drying the difference is particularly noticeable on rests and also note flags which are much thicker there are still some who prefer the sharpness of maestro I just love the blunt no-nonsense approach of bravura I did find myself wondering how it would hold up when printed so I thought it would be interesting to compare a bravura against Sebelius's font opus and the difference was actually more pronounced than I expected I guess the best way to describe it is that bravura really does look like a throwback to older printed music whereas opus looks like it was created on a computer I'm not against sharper digital looking notation far from it but in this case opus also seems to be going for an old-fashioned printed look and it's nowhere near as convincing it's not just the font that makes Darko's sheet music look so pleasant the team have also paid an enormous amount of attention to the rules that dictate how every aspect of the score should be laid out and have implemented a ton of best practices largely informed by the book behind bars written by Elaine Gould who works for the publishing house Faber known for their beautifully laid out scores it's also worth mentioning here the myriad of Engraving settings in derecho where they've gone to the significant trouble of showing clear visualizations and written explanations so the user knows what each option does this is one of the things about Sibelius that drove me nuts the second you start looking through engraving options you're almost instantly lost what does that do what does this mean regarding the appearance of your score darker wipes the floor with Sibelius the notation is clear legible and beautiful also shout-out to Darko sprint page this is one of those cases where the layout they decided upon really works you're clicking apart you want the preview updates then you select the pages you want printed and voila extremely handy okay so one or two more pros and cons and then we'll limp to the finish line I mean I've been talking about this for almost an hour now are you not you know tired of hearing me talk about Darko alright anyway let's just get through this if you want to instruments to be combined on a conductor score to save space Darko can do this automatically and it's on a different level to the competition I mean with Sibelius achieving this is the happiest of hacks you have to use a plugin which creates a new staff for the combination which means that if you make any changes you now have to do it in two different places otherwise your parts won't match the conductor's score and funnily enough when you read through the description of that plug-in you'll notice a special thank-you being made to none other than Daniel spread berry himself who provided support to help but see the light of day and since the pluggin has existed since 2012 that means Sebelius have had an eight-year head start on Darko eight years with all this information at their disposal and they still allow Darko to seal a march on them I think it's pretty clear at this point that Sebelius is massively under-resourced I mean I sometimes wonder if their office is just a single goldfish swimming around near a keyboard oh and by the by this combination Tec is one of those things that illustrates the power of the layouts panel which allows me to create a second main score so that I always have one that's condensed which I call my final score and another working score where I make everything really small so it's comfortable to compose in then I simply toggle over to the final score to see how everything is condensing and make any necessary engraving changes there this is the score that will eventually be printed it isn't easy to figure out this workflow although I suppose if you're watching this then you know it now I mean it has occurred to me that this is the ultimate derecho tutorial where's my check Yamaha the combined score feature isn't perfect yet and you'll most likely need to spend some time fixing the engraving to get it to be legible to do that you'll need to use the engrave mode it's fine although again impossible to intuitively figure out without looking through quite a few tutorials it's also another example of the team sticking way too rigidly to principle in this case the rule is all cosmetic alterations to the score must only be done in engrave mode this seems sensible enough when you say it but practically speaking it can be a bit weird like if I create a hairpin and I want to move it left to right sure I can do that in write mode because strictly speaking this is a writing operation but if I want to move it up or down that requires engrave mode I find this happens a lot and it's pretty frustrating to have to keep shifting gears in and out of different modes all the time you can't just get lost in the process of score creation without having to snap out of it in order to remind yourself of Darko's organizational principles before deducing where to go but Sibelius all positioning can be done by simply clicking and dragging directly on the score and you know what it doesn't hamper the writing process one bit it's actually one of my favorite things about the app I really find myself wishing that both apps would just emulate each other a bit more in this area one other thing I've noticed about engrave mode is that it doesn't come packaged with derecho elements the cheaper alternative version the targets and non-professionals which I find kind of funny because it prevents users from making basic corrections to elements become misplaced want to move a hairpin left or right sure thing want to move it up or down that's a pro feature son then there's play mode which feels like the part of the app most in need of improvement the ambition is to create a door like interface that allows you to manipulate settings like velocity or expression with precision it support for VST plugins' is getting better and it's pre on a roll and MIDI interface are getting there you just have to interact with it to see what I'm talking about if you're familiar with apps like Cubase reason Ableton or logic it'll be obvious right away how far this has to go however with recent releases it has improved and I'd be surprised if we don't see some big ideas turning up here in the future but like the rest of the app there are some really weird issues here too for example they've removed the solo and mute buttons that used to be available here and without them I can't quickly isolate an instrument to hear it so this forces you to use their mixer and if you're using no performer the mixer is really no use to you because it lumps multiple instruments together on one channel look I've created a new orchestral score and it only seems to have two channels flues and trombone what also I really don't like this mixer it's clumsy looking and the pan controls are awful on my high-definition laptop if I change the panning value I can't get it back to zero because it doesn't stretch across enough pixels and there isn't any shortcut I can press to make its responsiveness finer so I have to use this plus button to blow the whole thing up instead which means I now have to look at it more it really is a joyless tang with its yeah that'll do find appearance and it's Sega Genesis buttons it's kind of hard to put into words what I dislike about it there's there's a drawing I sometimes do to help me explain things like this I've been drawing it for years since I was a kid I use it to sort of visually explain the concept of jank eNOS yeah yeah that's it this is what I think of Darko's mixer oh and that reminds me how did I forget I completely forgot to talk about the jank yeah we're not done yet we're not limping anywhere it's in the thumbnail yeah I need to talk about the jank any to talk about to jank [Music] I think I can take it from here I mean you didn't even mention the mixer icon with that weird looking lopsided thing beside it but that's just scratching the surface come with me there's more to see [Applause] here at dark oh we've made sure that our notation system has the best of everything it's powerful powerful its advanced these durations are great you click on them and add them to your score and sometimes they let you click on as many as you want oh wow now I have all the notes you want to change this hairpin so it looks like this well just go down here and turn on the switch that enables the button that lets you do that why does a button require a switch well it's because a hold on a second it didn't change oh I see you forgot to take the tick box the tick box enables to switch and the switch enables the button she swallowed the bird to catch the spider she swallowed the spider to catch the fly I don't know why she swallowed the fly perhaps she has a janky brain say you want to turn off these split stems just follow these three steps step 1 turn on the switch that allows you to tick the tick-box yeah that again step 2 take the tick box and watch nothing happens step 3 I'll take the tick box which also does nothing say you want to edit this text there you go you want to edit this text no no that's not advanced to do that you have to go to your piano player and roll down the thing into it that if you roll over this text and arrows gonna appear at the end of it then click on the arrow to get a menu that contains the option to edit the name now that's what I call advanced two sets of text controls with the instrument names aligned to the right for maximum visibility [Applause] that's beautiful entering grace notes is easy I'll show you how in three easy steps step 1 press the grace nut button and then select your duration doing this turns off the grace enough button step 2 press the grace note button again okay now they're both on so let's enter some notes what you'll observe it wrong doing this turns off the grace note button step 3 just press the grace note button to turn time and you can enter your grace notes there we go now you have your grace notes I'm the grace note button that's turned off again drank it up love that jenker let's select this pizzicato marking and now we have a hairpin too for free hair pins on pizzicato together at last that shouldn't have happened oh I see your problem you didn't check the tick box on your blue tack startup so let's set the Steinberg hup-two concert pitch want to tell the player to switch to a different instrument nothing here to do that okay I guess it must be in that area dedicated to instruments and players no ok where do you think I should go to tell the player to switch instrument what was that down here under this drop-down called galley view is a really cold galley view rig the tackles and breaches lads she's round into man the for Topsail and sends the gunner aft hi captain deleting bars is easy just click on this gray rectangle and select the delete button wanted to leave multiple bars no you've got nothing wow that tick box switches really up there with the Great's it's up there with quit Sibelius and you all imagine if we combined all three together oh it's more than just a dialog it's a giant collage look I even janked it onto a t-shirt for you to buy the link is in the description seriously this actually exists you miserable janky hat fraud teracle made advanced but it's also a little laggy drag that up tape marking over here come on come on you can do it come on come on come on oh how much longer hooray let's take a moment to appreciate this design innovation with its ability to block the score and it's wonderfully chosen color light gray on white if you're wondering how accessible this is for people with poor eyesight well the standard minimum contrast ratio is 4.5 to 1 now if we test this color oh you gotta be kidding me that's that's like literally the worst accessibility fail I've ever seen in my entire life that's that's too much that's too much jank oh yeah you know if you opened our go up on a Mac it automatically sets your volume to the maximum setting really goes well with dark Oh beep [Music] I can't take this much what's what's happening to me oh now I am toriko what are you doing what are you doing no that is not advanced no advanced so yeah Jericho is really impressive I like it um sorry if I kind of maybe misled you there with that last bit I suppose you probably thought I was going to conclude otherwise well I guess I'm not surprised I didn't expect this video to lurk from praise to criticism so much I mean on the positive side it does a lot of stuff extremely well it looks great it features a lot of attention to detail and it's engraving is fantastic it also has tons of new ideas and has really made an impressive attempt to solve long-standing problems and with that in mind I think this is actually one of the big thank yous we all owe to the Darko team thanks for forcing everyone else to have to up their game from spending a lot of time looking through their forum posts and engagement on social media the impression I get is of a very professional and engaged team Daniel in particular is super disciplined in the face of sometimes less than reasonable comments and other times he's just Pleasant by default I mean look at this a user recently tweeted at terrico official users out there I have questions if you've got the time in patience now I know a lot of people who would have either ignored this or curtly asked the person to be a little more specific but Daniel replies what's up ready willing and able to answer any questions you might have I don't know why I like this so much it just seems above and beyond to me Oh Daniel I could just give you a big kiss so - the big question if I was commissioned tomorrow to write a score which of the two apps would I choose Sibelius or Darko now I'm not gonna lie I've written this paragraph three times in six months at first it was Sibelius hands down because writing is so much faster and then as I began finishing music at Darko and seeing how well the parts and layouts were handled I thought well that claws back a bit of time mm its neck and neck now and then I was actually commissioned to write a new piece and I limited myself to those two options and the choice was just obvious Sibelius despite the fact that I was actively using Darko everyday and the reason it's just more permissive and allows me to get lost in the in process but as I said it's closed really close and I could easily change my mind in about six months time for me right now the deciding factor is that Sibelius lets me write how I want to write whereas with derecho I have to write the way derecho wants me to write and this is not the conclusion I wanted to come to I've been following the dark of story for ages I love how much detail and passion they've shown for their products and I have enormous respect for them but this isn't a straight no it's an almost regarding the things I don't like not everyone is going to agree and for some Darko already makes sense and it has won a few diehard admirers for those who think I overly focus on first-time usage as a designer I have a particular dislike for apps that are made with the expectation that new users should spend an enormous amount of time coming to terms with it the reality of modern life is that we're now required to keep learning software all the time it's overwhelming and a designer's job is to try and reduce that pain as much as possible think about those who are only at the beginning of their journey it sucks when you're just starting out and your initial experience of trying to write some music is insanely technical a lot of young students have got in contact with me to express our demotivating their experience of Sibelius was and if derecho took over in the classroom now I think that would mean yet another generation going through the same thing but why not find out for yourself and get their free trial if you've got this far in the video you will most likely have a much easier time of it than the people I tested let me know if they fixed that elicenser issue yet and my final thought to all people in music software is this consistency is important absolutely but interface design is as much an art as a science and it's ok to sometimes break your own rules if not then you're super rational system may translate into a frustrating experience and the only way out of this is to focus on rigorous user testing if the app is communicating well you'll see that reflected in how people use it and when your system produces an unfortunate interaction oddity like having one mode for moving things horizontally and another for moving them up or down it's dangerous to take the attitude that the oddity is actually rational because it fits your system and your system is rational instead come up with a clever exception there's no God of interface design watching over us were not honorbound to always be a hundred percent organizationally pure these users aren't robots they're creative musicians and half of them mad get mad Oracle get all up in everyone's face they made you redundant they thought they could do without you but you will show them you're gonna make them pay for what they did the next time Sibelius crashes it took me forever [Music] if you like my diatribe subscribe [Music]

Channel: Tantacrul

Views: 363,223

Rating: 4.9618273 out of 5

Keywords: Song Writing, Composition, Music theory, Classical, music composition software, music writing software, best scoring software, sheet music writer, music notation software, music notation, Dorico, dorico 3.1, dorico 3 review, dorico 3 vs sibelius, Steinberg, avid sibelius, Sibelius, Sibelius Ultimate, Tantacrul, interface design tutorial, design, music software, MuseScore, composing software, Janky, steinberg dorico, music production

Id: S-3wEC6Fj_8

Length: 66min 58sec (4018 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

He does raise some good points and I do like his videos but things like just bashing on Coldplay because it is mainstream is just immature in my opinion.