Dorico 4 From a Guitarists Perspective
The Dorico 4 tips and tricks in this post can help to save you a lot of time if you are new to using Dorico.
I usually don’t have much patience with software that isn’t easy to figure out. However, I gave Dorico more time than usual for three reasons.
- It’s not just a legacy program that’s been around for decades
- It promises to be a “desktop publishing” software to write my guitar music books, without using other software programs such as Word, Excel, Acrobat etc…
- You can catch the sense of dedication that the Dorico team have to keep improving
Click to get my FREE Dorico 4 SE Cheat-sheet intended for guitar and bass guitars, and useful for anyone else entering notes into Dorico. Shortcuts on the sheet will also work in Dorico Elements and Dorico Pro. Download the FREE SE software, or try 30 day trials of either Elements or Pro here.
Suggestion, spend time with SE version first, until you get used to it. Then if you are interested in the upgrade, you’ll have a full 30 days to try it.
Get to know about the powerful flows features in Dorico 4 SE, Elements and Pro that help you to organize music books and worksheets – in this post.
Discounts on Dorico 4
Dorico may offer promotional discounts from time to time. They also give a generous discount to crossgrade from a competitor’s software if you have a license. Educational discounts are also available to students and teachers. See their website for details.
5-Line Music Staff Manuscript Notebook with Contents Pages – Standard 8-1/2″ x 11″ music notation book with numbered pages and blank Contents pages. Each page has 10 staff systems.
About the Dorico 4 Cheat-Sheet
Being new to Dorico (but not to notation software), I am more acutely aware of the difficulties of trying to learn this software than experienced users. That’s why I compiled the cheat-sheet notes to have those critically important shortcuts at hand.
It took me 10’s of hours to get the information in the cheat-sheet so please take advantage of it and share it. I hope that my Dorico 4 Tips and Tricks helps you get up to speed quickly with either the FREE Dorico SE, Dorico Elements, or Dorico Pro.
Consider subscribing to this website and to the GuitarBasement YouTube channel to keep up with the latest content.
Guitar Practice Log book – Weekly Planner: 10 row practice log, 4 multipurpose TAB/staff lines, fretboard length blank chord chart Lasts well over 2 Years – 1 page per week.
The Dorico Learning Curve
I love software that is intuitive that I can use without reading instructions or doing tutorials. Dorico isn’t that type of software. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad. You just need a little help. That’s why I wrote the Dorico 4 Tips and Tricks guide.
Guitar Manuscript Notebook – 5-plus-1 music sheets on numbered pages with Contents pages.
Tips and Tricks Video to Get You Started in Dorico
If you plan to try Dorico SE or the other trial versions, do yourself a favor and watch my video below. As a beginner I can help get you through some of the difficulties. Download the GuitarBasement “cheat-sheet” here.
Also, you can download the Dorica Quick Reference Card pdf directly from the Steinberg site here. Although they didn’t update the Card to version 4 yet, most of the shortcuts should be valid.