July 2025
Super grateful to the incredibly smart and generous people who have been invaluable in getting through the Dorico learning curve. I've gone from "frustrated blank stare" to "Dorico is an amazing game changer I can't live without." Everyone of these people is super passionate about Dorico and music creation in general and are incredibly awesome and gracious people to put so much time into making the path more accessible for the rest of us. Can't thank each one of them enough.
More on my Dorico back story here.
Sibelius versus Dorico: My Take
I started this running list of resources to paste a link when I see people ask (like I was doing so much early on) for great Dorico resources. Since I'll reuse this often, I'd love to hear anything to add to or expound on this. If you are one of the amazing people who teaches about Dorico (or related topics like orchestration, DAW, etc.) let me know so I can check it out and get you on this list. I'll update this more in the future. (July 2025).
Best place to start (for me).
Fantastic communicator and teacher.
Super clear path from knowing nothing to the most relevant, useful tasks and skills.
Great way to go from: "Dorico is confusing, what the heck is this?" to "Got it….Makes sense! Now I love Dorico!"
It felt like he was constantly explaining the exact next question that was now forming in my head. Meaning, he has a great sense for the logical sequence of questions and steps to make it all gel.
Percussionist, great percussion insight and help. His summer lab on percussion writing is one of the best I've ever seen to take the mystery out of what often feels like a dark art to non-percussionists.
Very good composer and orchestrator so he connects the pragmatics from those skills into the Dorico work flow extremely well.
Summer labs available for deep dive into percussion, orchestration, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/@ErnestoComposer
Ernesto's Dorico YouTube Playlist
Not directly Dorico, but REALLY good for orchestration, percussion, etc.:
https://composersummerlabs.com/
John Barron Videos and Hangouts. Deep dive. Fantastic, thorough, deep, long live streams. Extremely knowledgeable and easy to understand. Super nice guy too. Percussion video is crucial to learn the confusing but cool percussion work flow. If I have the story straight, John was one of several people (along with Daniel Spreadbury, Anthony Hughes, etc.) on the Sibelius team until Avid (foolishly) fired the whole team. Steinberg hired them to build Dorico from scratch. Imagine Microsoft Word, Photoshop, or Pro Tools getting a second chance to "do it all right and better" with the same team a second time around without being tethered to old code and old user expectations (basically a huge part of what killed Finale). Fascinating origin story and huge part of why Dorico is such a strong and fast evolving product. You can see Dorico using much of the good methodology of Sibelius while improving on it in this rare "second chance" scenario. John (and Anthony and Daniel) is literally going to the source. John (and the others) show up super helpful on the forums and social media all the time. Dorico Legend!
Anthony Hughes (Official Training Videos. Great on Basics Overview. New Releases. Many of the basics videos are getting pretty old from older version. Mostly relevant but some things are moved around in Dorico so getting a bit dated but still good stuff. The newer stuff is rock solid and always essential.)
Daniel Spreadbury doesn't do training videos but he shows up on the forums all the time with excellent insights.
https://www.youtube.com/@dorico
https://www.steinberg.net/dorico/learn/
https://blog.dorico.com/getting-started/
Percussion & Drum Set Notation | Discover Dorico
Search YouTube for John Barron Dorico
Manual:
https://www.steinberg.help/r/dorico-pro/6.0/en
https://forums.steinberg.net/c/dorico/8/l/top
https://blog.dorico.com/playback-templates/
Jazz Charts, Percussion, Engraving, Chords, Complex Meter, Work Flow, Wide Coverage. David seems to cover about everything and when something new happens, he's one of the first to bring some solid insight. He did a fantastic, comprehensive multi part series on page formatting and layout (Part 1 Here). That is one of the harder Dorico concepts to grasp because so much is buried in menus, settings, and unusual concepts (red triangles, etc.). It makes sense once you get it, but it takes a while to get it. David's series may be the new "go to" on that topic with some really helpful lead up on getting all the defaults and settings right first. The farther I get into Dorico, the more I'm relying on him as a general wealth of knowledge. Heads up, even if you think you have the gist of one of his videos, watch it anyway. Every video I learned a few random weird but super useful things that Dorico does.
Fantastic Teacher (Actually a really good jazz teacher at a community college in Spokane). His approach is super structured like a super well prepared, well thought out college course. But, always super accessible and easy to follow. True master teacher.
Great to get deeper and beef up practical skills.
https://www.youtube.com/@larsenjazzmusic
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB_2atr-jeBdCgWCH3Y60Vfvbpq_T0x8v
Really good for work flow, playback templates, end points, expression maps, VST, libraries, Cubase crossover, and really cool advanced stuff, deep dive into the super creative/geeky stuff I love…just really good stuff. I'm one of those guys that imagines all kinds of crazy ways to "rewire" a thing to make it do cool stuff. Will is that guy big time and has already worked out a ton of the ideas I know I will inevitably end up curious about. I love watching his content to see where's he's already gone that I'd eventually like to get.
You don't want to get too far into Will's stuff until you are feeling pretty solid on the fundamentals (i.e. Ernesto above). But, once you have the gist of Dorico, Will gets you into some really cool, innovative, and advanced stuff. In fact, he's working out really cool work flows, expression maps, libraries, that really push the functionality of Dorico.
I had to take several runs at end points, play back templates, VST's, etc. Those concepts feel and sound way more complicated than they really are or need to be. Will was the most helpful for me here with a heavy does of John Barron.
Percussion is a whole extra learning curve, one of the quirkier things to learn but makes tons of sense when you do. Will is great for that along with that super important John Barron video combined with David Larsen, and CJ Rhen.
https://www.youtube.com/@musicchefpro
Jazz and Big Band Charts, Percussion and Drums, Work Flow, Slash Notation, Note Entry, Chords, Very Practical. CJ is a super solid working musician (sax player) and brings a very pragmatic, real world, real work, real projects perspective to Dorico. Some Dorico instruction can get a little abstract, hypothetical, or removed from the day to day fundamentals. CJ's stuff gets you to the nitty gritty "what I need to do" more than the "what I could do" which is really important for getting a good foundation, or just figuring out how to get a project done. He's also very active in the online discussions, super helpful. Can't say enough what a smart, knowledgeable, and really nice guy CJ is.
https://www.youtube.com/@cjrhenmusic
Really good extra take on all of the above, new angles I didn't catch elsewhere. Great way to reinforce and round out what you are getting above.
https://www.youtube.com/@homayoontv
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL52miNzunHR-HDflXljkRTGvriNSuPkV6
Complex/Modern Composition in Dorico.
https://www.youtube.com/@mathewarrellin
Scoring Notes
Phillip Rothman
All Things Engraving and Notation Software.
https://www.youtube.com/@nycmusicservices
All around awesome, fun, entertaining, and super informative. Strong on film score perspective.
Great For: Orchestration, Film Scoring, Composition, Dorico Basics, Cubase, Spitfire BBCSO.
https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkSpaceEducation
https://campus.thinkspace.ac.uk/student/course
Excellent on getting started w/ basics.
I connected better for "Getting Started" with Ernesto Aguirre (www.LearnDorico.com). I would start with Ernesto first then go here for reinforcement. Most of the "getting started" recommendations I see point to this Udemy course. It wasn't making as much sense to me the first time I went through it. Ernesto's really made the whole things gel. Then, when I went back later to Luke's course after going through Ernesto, Luke's content made a lot more sense and I found it to be super helpful. So, for sure do this. It is excellent. Just do it after you've done Ernesto. Also, it goes on sale all the time so wait for that.
https://www.udemy.com/course/dorico-complete-music-notation-course/
List Compiled by Jason Barney
www.TalmageMusic.com
www.JasonBarney.com