All this week, we’ll be publishing posts from the 2025 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California. It’s a huge exhibition, so we’ll focus on what we do best: covering the field of music notation software and related technology. Follow all of our NAMM 2025 coverage at Scoring Notes, and on our social media accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
It has been a while since Dorico had a dedicated presence at the NAMM Show. As Steinberg’s John Barron told me, “I haven’t been here since 2020. So, we did NAMM 2020, then there was some kind of lockdown, and we didn’t really go very far at all for a while. But it’s nice to be back. I’m just here for the weather.”
Having shoveled snow a few days before my trip to Anaheim, I couldn’t agree more. But NAMM is more about the sunny locale; after all, it’s held in a convention center where you might not see the sun during most of your attendance. It’s about the people you meet and interact with. And as the international product specialist for Dorico, John’s met quite a few people. “While it’s a music show, that covers quite a broad area,” he said. “There are some individuals, but there are obviously some publishers here as well. I think also the kind of a lot of the people who are here are also in some way related, technology-wise, because there’s a lot of tech here as well. There are film composers we’ve been talking to who are using [Dorico]; there are educators who are using it. There’s people who do some other thing, but need to produce charts for [their] band or whatever. For one reason or another, they want to come and talk to me.”
Notation software is a small slice of the massive scale of NAMM. “There’s a lot of more people at this show who would be using a DAW than would be using a notation program,” John said, as we talked about the appeal of the Dorico-powered score editor in Cubase 14 to the NAMM attendees. “We wanted to make a new score editor in Cubase, and we could use the Dorico technology to do that… The people who are using Cubase, they don’t want to spend a lot of time on scoring. They just need to get some notes out in a really readable format, really quick MIDI cleanup and everything else. And if you can shortcut a load of that, that’s a big part of what they’re doing.”
We don’t always get a sense of Dorico’s place in the wider world of Steinberg and Yamaha, but it’s definitely on display at NAMM. “Yamaha is the largest instrument manufacturer in the world, I think. Probably the oldest as well,” John said. “The number of different things they do is quite immense. So that’s why it’s basically the entire floor upstairs of just Yamaha stuff, but it’s well sectioned.”
Last year’s news of the end of Finale permeated the discussions I had with all of the music notation software developers, but none more so than with John, because of Dorico’s special status as MakeMusic’s officially endorsed migration path for its users. This has led to increased communication between the Steinberg and MakeMusic teams. “They [the MakeMusic team] are really nice guys and we’re collaborating more on various things to help each other,” John said. “People who have used Finale before and want to use Dorico. So even now we’re talking to one of their support guys about how things we might be able to do to help them, and things that they might not be aware of that would help their customers, as they transition. I’m finding out the kind of questions that they’re getting from their end as well.”
Finale users are keen on what Dorico has to offer, as well, and that’s affected the product’s development, John said. “Obviously we’ve had a lot of questions from people. We’ve been talking to a lot of people at the show and in the last five months. And yes, there are things that we’ve changed. We were obviously well aware from our previous history of what Finale does, but even some of the little detail things where people like to do this particular little function or this particular little thing. And, is there something, therefore, that we can add in Dorico to make that actually an even smoother transition? We have added those in the most recent updates. It’s not like we’ve had to reinvent the wheel in its entirety to affect Dorico because I think we were in a good place anyway. But if this had happened a few years ago — last time I was at NAMM, for example — Dorico wouldn’t have necessarily been as good a place at that point to service the Finale users.”
In asking about Dorico 6, which is due out some time in 2025, John didn’t offer details, but he did say, “There’s probably more notation type things rather than playback things possibly coming up, and probably also workflow things. And in the usual Dorico way, unique features that other programs don’t do because we’re listening to people to find out what the things are that they need to be able to do.”
What do you need to be able do? Have a look and listen to my complete interview with John Barron on the NYC Music Services YouTube channel.
Keep coming back to Scoring Notes for more coverage from the 2025 NAMM Show, and follow us on our social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Dorico 6 in 2026?! I thought it was coming this year…
Sorry, that was a typo — it’s 2025. Fixed – thanks for catching it.
Phew :)
Philip,
In his meeting with you, John Barron referred to a 4-octave xKey midi keyboard controller and suggested you have one. Is this something that is going to become imminently available to the public or is the xKey37 still the larger (and largest) version available for the foreseeable future?
Thanks for the careful ear! The XKey 37 is indeed a 3-octave, not a 4-octave keyboard. It was the last interview of the day and it’s possible my eardrums were suffering at that point from NAMM…
Thanks!
They do now have an XSynth version, for people who like that sort of thing: https://www.gearnews.com/esi-xsynth-synthesizer/
Thanks, John. The new XSynth looks interesting but it was the prospect of a 4 octave XKey that was of most interest to me personally. Perhaps that will materialize one day.