Introduction

Welcome to this First Steps guide, which we have created to help you get started with Dorico by taking you through all the steps necessary to create and prepare a short piano piece, followed by an extract of a blues song.

We hope that the principles and techniques you learn as part of this guide help you become familiar with common operations and feel more confident when working on your own projects.

This guide introduces you to the following:

• The user interface and its most important parts

• The different modes in Dorico and their functions

• Setting up a project

• Writing music and adding the notations required to produce a short piano piece and some additional common notations in a separate piece

• Laying out and formatting pages, including adjusting notations such as beam grouping and stem directions

• Playing back music and adjusting playback

• Printing and exporting

The piano piece used in these tasks is Dora Pejačević’s “Walzer-Capricen No. 2”. A PDF of the full piece is available on steinberg.help for your reference.

Within a relatively short duration, this piece contains many notations common to most musical styles, such as dynamics and articulations, as well as notes in multiple voices simultaneously, chords, and cross-staff beaming. Other common notations not included in this piece, such as lyrics and chord symbols, are in a separate section at the end of the guide.