New orchestral sounds, faster workflow, more customization

Dorico 5 includes a new orchestral sound library, brings more expressive playback, and makes it easy to produce more life-like performances with a dynamic stereo soundstage. Easily trigger drum patterns with the included Groove Agent SE plug-in.

Customize your score with a comprehensive instrument editor and eight new music font families, and boost your workflow with scrub playback, mouse note editing, multiple item creation, double-tap note input, and many more improvements throughout the application.

Iconica Sketch orchestral library

Iconica Sketch offers you a complete orchestra with 34 different instruments and 140 articulations, seamlessly integrated with Dorico 5. The original recordings from Iconica have been carefully selected and re-mastered to deliver a well-balanced, high-quality orchestral experience, tailored to instantly create modern and cinematic scores. Designed to be lightweight and high-performance, the whole library takes up less than 5GB.

Pro • Elements • SE • iPad

The idea behind Iconica Sketch

Iconica Sketch was designed to give musicians at every level a complete, professional orchestra at their fingertips, which is compact (4.6 GB) in size and extremely fast to load. Based on original ultra-high quality, exceedingly detailed recordings from the Orchestral Tools for Iconica library, we created a new mix which is tailored to instantly create modern and cinematic scores and enrich modern pop productions.

All articulations

Stage and Space templates

Dorico comes with dozens of powerful effects processors to sculpt your sound, and Dorico 5’s new Space and Stage templates make it simple to try out different configurations: use a simple visual interface to move instruments on the virtual stage, and Dorico automatically translates that into pan and reverb settings. Experiment with different rooms, and quickly recall any previous state by creating a mixer snapshot. Reorder and rename outputs, create send buses, and more.

Pro Elements • SE • iPad

Pitch contour emphasis

Dorico reads the notations in your score the way a human musician does, automatically switching to different articulations and playing techniques using whatever sample library you choose. Building on these foundations, Dorico’s playback is more expressive than ever, using sophisticated algorithms to breathe life into phrases in the same way human musicians do. No longer do you need great keyboard skills to bring your notated music to life.

Pro Elements • SE • iPad

Voice balancing for polyphonic instruments

Human musicians use their experience and intuition to interpret the complex polyphonic textures of music written for piano, keyboard, harp, and mallet percussion, emphasizing melodies and bass lines above material that provides texture and harmony – and do all of this without direct, detailed instructions in the music notation. Dorico 5’s new voice balancing algorithms allow it to come closer than ever to the expressive nuance of human performance, completely automatically. It can even emphasize fugue subjects in contrapuntal music.

Pro • Elements • SE • iPad

Groove Agent SE

Groove Agent SE is the entry-level version of Steinberg’s creative drum software and is now included with Dorico 5. It includes a version of The Kit, an acoustic drum kit recorded in Berlin’s Teldex Studios, including its classic reverb chamber, and provides a choice of two mic positions. Not only can Groove Agent SE be used as a high-quality drum kit playback device for your Dorico projects, but it also includes more than 400 MIDI drum patterns, performed by top studio drummers, and mixed by Steinberg’s expert engineers. You can trigger these in Dorico using the new MIDI trigger region or drag and drop any pattern onto the track overview in Play mode to import that pattern.

Pro Elements • SE • iPad

MIDI triggers

Dorico’s new MIDI trigger regions play a note or chord that doesn’t appear in the score for a period determined by you. This is especially useful for triggering MIDI patterns in plug-ins like Groove Agent SE, or other pattern-based instruments such as TGuitar. If you’re writing for a real drummer or guitarist, you don’t need to write out their part in full: give them the structure of the piece, a few rhythmic cues, and chord symbols, and they’ll take care of the rest. But if you want to have some realistic playback without spending a lot of time and effort writing out music that won’t ultimately be played by your human musicians, pattern-based plug-ins can save a lot of time.

Pro Elements • SE • iPad

Scrub playback

Dorico 5 introduces a new scrub playback feature that makes it easy to audition the whole ensemble or a single instrument at any point and move forwards or backwards through the playback at any speed. This is invaluable for checking harmonies, finding wrong notes, and focusing on specific moments in your music.

Pro Elements • SE • iPad

Holds and pauses playback

Dorico now intelligently plays back fermatas, caesuras, and breath marks, bringing a new level of expressiveness to the performance of your music. Tweak the default playback effect for each type of hold and pause, and edit the performance of individual pauses in the Key Editor. Glissando playback is improved too, and can now use continuous pitch bend where appropriate.

Pro • Elements • SE • iPad

Smart divisi – now even smarter

Dorico Pro’s smart divisi features make it easy to write complex divided parts for section players, typically strings, but there were some awkward corner cases that weren’t handled perfectly. We’ve gone back to the drawing board and revamped divisi, leading to more stable results, especially at the transitions between unison and divisi music, and involving system items like time and key signatures.

Pro • Elements SE iPad

Multiple item creation

Dorico 5 overhauls item creation from a selection: you can now create multiple items at the same time, on multiple instruments, and even at different positions on each instrument.
Pro Elements • SE • iPad

Instrument editor

Dorico includes definitions for over 600 pitched and unpitched instruments, but no database can capture every variation of instruments or include all cultures and historical periods. With Dorico Pro 5, you can modify or create instrument definitions to suit your needs, and easily reuse them in future projects. Freely assign instruments to existing or new families, and create your own instrument score orders.
Pro • Elements • SE • iPad

Live editing

Dorico 5 includes new features to quickly edit and copy music using the mouse. You can drag selected notes to alter their pitch, or drag them to new rhythmic positions, with a live overlay to show you where the notes will be moved to. Interacting directly with the mouse makes it easier and quicker to sculpt your music, whether you do it directly in the notation or in the Key Editor.
Pro Elements • SE • iPad

MusicXML import and export

MusicXML is the widely supported interchange format for exchanging music notation data between applications. Dorico 5 brings enriched support for importing harmonics, playing techniques, ornaments, holds and pauses, and more. MusicXML export is also greatly expanded, with page layout, music and text font information, holds and pauses, ornaments and trills, arpeggio signs, and much more included in exported files.
Pro Elements • SE • iPad

New music fonts

Dorico 5 includes no fewer than eight new music font families to bring greater variety to the look of your projects: four new handwritten-style fonts, and four engraved fonts, all available at the click of a single button.
Pro Elements • SE • iPad

New in Dorico Elements 5

Dorico Elements is more capable than ever, with enough functionality and power for all but the most demanding professionals. If you’re using Dorico at home, at school, or at university, Dorico Elements has everything you need to make beautiful scores. Dorico Elements 5 brings many new capabilities that were previously only available in Dorico Pro, including:

Write for ensembles of any size (previously limited to 24 players)

Expanded Engrave mode with horizontal and vertical spacing controls

Customizable playback options

Customizable text and music fonts

All the above new capabilities are also included in Dorico for iPad if you choose to buy the optional monthly or annual subscription, or purchase the one-off Lifetime Unlock in-app purchase.