NAMM 2026: John Barron opens the door to Dorico’s future

We’ll be publishing coverage from the 2026 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California. The show has events running from January 20-24, 2026, and floor exhibits active from January 22 through January 24. 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 2026 coverage at Scoring Notes.

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At the 2026 NAMM Show, I sat down once again with John Barron, international product specialist at Steinberg, to talk about where Dorico finds itself at this stage of its evolution.

When we spoke at NAMM last year, Dorico was emerging from the release of Dorico 5 with a clear sense of direction and confidence. Since then, the software has continued to develop with steady momentum, building carefully on Dorico 6 rather than pivoting or reinventing itself. The past year has been less about headline shifts and more about consolidation, refinement, and the cumulative effect of many smaller, thoughtful improvements (and you can find them all in our Scoring Notes Product Guide).

That trajectory raises a set of questions that feel increasingly relevant as Dorico matures. How does a product built around a strong, opinionated design philosophy continue to scale without losing clarity? When does it make sense to refine existing capabilities rather than expand into new ones? And how do you balance power, approachability, and real-world workflow demands as the user base grows more diverse?

In this conversation, John reflects on Dorico’s current development phase, how its underlying design principles continue to guide day-to-day decisions, and where users should most clearly feel progress compared to a year ago. We also talk about under-the-radar features, user feedback, interoperability with broader music-production workflows, playback and realism, and how automation can support — rather than supplant — notational intent.

As with previous Scoring Notes interviews, the goal here is not to catalog features, but to better understand the thinking behind them — and what that thinking suggests about Dorico’s long-term identity and Steinberg’s continued commitment to scoring and notation.

A transcript of the conversation follows, edited for clarity.

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Scoring Notes interview with John Barron at NAMM 2026

Philip: All right everybody, welcome back once again to Scoring Notes. I’m Philip, and we’re at the 2026 NAMM Show, speaking with John Barron, who is the International Product Specialist for Scoring at Steinberg, and specifically Dorico. His wardrobe and his badge and all these things identify who he is and who he works for — but more importantly, he’s here to talk to me, and through that, to talk to you. John, I’m…

John: I’m only here to talk to you. Oh. That’s the only reason we come to NAMM.

Philip: It’s the only reason you’re here at this exact moment in time.

John: Yeah. I think we did meet at least a couple of times last year though, didn’t we?

Philip: We did, at the various…

John: …conferences. I think I was in the US three times at least, I think, last year.

Philip: Well, welcome back. It’s great to see you again. Yes, that’s right — we were at MOLA in Ann Arbor, and then of course we were here at NAMM exactly a year ago. So, thinking of the past year: a lot has happened in all respects, but specifically with Dorico. If you follow Scoring Notes, and if you’re a Dorico user, Dorico 6 was released…

John: Yeah — in April. Yep.

Philip: …and first of all, congratulations on that. I think it was very new when we spoke about it at MOLA. There were a lot of impressed MOLA attendees seeing the features of the software and what it could do. So that was very exciting.

I feel like those updates have arrived with a clear sense of momentum, and the cadence has been steady — fundamentally about building one release on top of the other. There hasn’t been a big direction shift that I’ve sensed. So how would you characterize Dorico’s development phase right now?

John: Yeah — certainly the last few versions: we don’t have a regular regular schedule like maybe some other products that Steinberg do, but it’s fairly regular. You’re going to get, you know, 14–19 months between versions often. And that can depend on what we’re working on, and when we think it’s a good time to release something — when we think things are ready.

So the last version, Dorico 6 — the major version release — was nine months ago. As usual, we do that and have those certain sets of new features that we’ll work on. And then after that we do the point releases, which build on some of those things. So things like the Proofreading panel: we can add more things to it; and the condensing side of things: we can add more things to some of those.

At the moment we’re in that phase. It’s currently 6.1 — officially 6.1.10. And we will probably do another 6-point-something. And then we’ll probably go quieter for a bit while we work on other big things for a while.

Some people come to NAMM and say, “Oh, is there a new release now?” Well, no — we’ve only just done one. So we’ll probably look at what the next bigger things are that we want to work on, as well as increasing everything else. So that’s where we’re at.

Philip: And that’ll come as no surprise to anyone that follows your development cycle now. You enter, I believe, your 11th year of Dorico…

John: It’ll actually be 10 years this October.

Philip: Oh, okay — 2016, right?

John: 2016, yes. Fall of 2016.

Philip: That surprises people.

John: I was speaking to somebody yesterday at your event and they said, “10 years?” And they went, “I suppose there was a pandemic in the middle, wasn’t there?” Because we’ve not done necessarily 10 NAMMs since then.

Philip: Right.

John: Some people forget. But yeah — 10 years.

Philip: And really even longer, because you started work on it in 2012.

John: Yeah.

Philip: So we’re talking about something that’s been with us quite a long time.

John: But there are still lots of people saying — because if they were using Finale previously, they weren’t necessarily looking for something before — so this is “Oh, it’s version six,” and “What can it do?” But some people have been following us for quite a long time.

Philip: I think of the early days, where it was just new feature after new feature — and we still get that. You mentioned proofreading; we’ve seen the piano…

John: …yeah.

Philip: …but we’re at a point now where you’re talking about refining more than that fire hose of new features.

How do you decide — you’re going to have maybe one more Dorico 6 release and then go dark for a bit — is it set in stone, or is there something else that informs the decision-making process about when it’s time to refine versus expand?

John: It can be a bit of both. We probably always have an idea of when we’d like to do something, but other things can come along that make a difference. Things like the piano — whatever we decide to call the piano between us…

Philip: Yeah.

John: …that can be impacted by when it’s being released as an instrument or when it’s going to be available in Cubase. Other things can make a change.

And we’re not going to say now, “This is when the next version will come out,” in case we need to move it for some reason. The main problem is always priority: what do we work on next, with the big list of things we’d like to do and ideas we’ve got — some of which we might have had even 10 years ago. How do we prioritize?

We added cutaways, and that was a surprise to lots of people. Somebody at Steinberg said, “How did you decide that was going to be a major thing?” — from talking to people, what their needs are right now, what they need to do, when we can fit it in, which developers are available at the time. Some things make sense for some people to do versus others. It’s really Daniel’s problem: prioritizing and setting a timeline, talking to developers, what it’s going to require.

We’d like to release features as soon as possible, but we also want them to be right. We don’t do half measures. One challenge has been: we go from not having a feature at all to having a best-in-class version of it. But some of those take time. And sometimes we release something and then still add more in a point release.

Philip: Is there ever a sunk-cost-fallacy situation where something ends up being far more complex than you thought, but you keep doing it because you’ve already spent so much?

John: Something that takes longer than you originally thought — yeah. A classic example would be when we very first started working on Dorico — even before I joined the team — we looked into things like iPad versions of Dorico. But we didn’t release anything at that point, and we decided: “Let’s not do that project; let’s focus on other things for a bit.”

But you could say with chord symbols: we went from not having any chord symbols to having lots of really good chord-symbol features. And one of our problems is it always feels like somebody’s still working on chord symbols because there are even more things people want to add — and you go, “How can it be that big? How can it have taken that long?” So maybe that’s the one that’s never-ending. You’ll never finish it.

Philip: I’m always amazed: active products like yours and others, and the long history of other products — and how many times people have thought “I can do this — I can make notation software, it’ll do everything,” and it’s just a rabbit hole.

One thing that characterizes Dorico is the strong underlying design philosophy — the modes, the separation of processes. Dorico was conceived almost 15 years ago and released almost 10 years ago. How does that philosophy continue to guide day-to-day product decisions as you add new features? Do they fit neatly into this category or that category as the software gets more complex?

John: There are things that we thought of conceptually — how things would work — that you haven’t necessarily seen yet, even 10 years after. A good example of something you have seen is condensing. In the very first product launch live stream, somebody asked about various things and Daniel could answer in a way that alluded to what condensing became — because we planned that from the beginning.

The bones of Dorico are strong. It’s not like we’re bolting things on. A lot of things conceptually have been planned — maybe not the details — and that’s been very good. Cutaways: we knew when we wanted to do cutaways we were going to do them in an automatic way, without manual bits, and without feeling like an add-on or a plug-in.

And there are other things like Proofreading, where now we’ve added the concepts and the panels, we can add more “proofers” — new things it can check — and refine things that are there already.

Philip: Speaking of users: cutaways are a quality-of-life improvement for people who need them, but what about the everyday user who’s never used a cutaway score? Where would they feel progress — notation accuracy, engraving efficiency, everyday workflow?

John: As part of the balancing act, we try to make sure we’re covering lots of areas — and we never please everybody. People will say “This is great, but why are people complaining?” because maybe they don’t feel we did their thing.

In a previous version, the marketing made it feel very playback-oriented. If you’re an engraver you felt like we weren’t doing your thing. Some of it is how we talked about it — a lot of features were there; it was how we described them. So we’re careful about how we talk about features, and in recent versions we’ve tried to be clearer about which areas are improved.

Proofreading can be useful for everybody in some way. There are nice additions to playback, and useful engraving things even if it’s not cutaways. One thing I recommend is: don’t just read the version history notes — go look in Engraving Options at what those options are. It doesn’t sink in when you’re just reading notes. You go, “That’s the thing I’ve been looking for — it’s in there.” And often there’s a picture, which helps a lot.

Philip: That’s what I do: I try to find where it exists in the software — for my own knowledge and for Scoring Notes.

John: Exactly. A picture can speak a thousand words. When you see the graphic you go, “Oh, it’s that.”

Philip: Even in point releases, there’s a lot there — bug fixes and “improvements,” but some of those “improvements” other products might call new features. Is there anything you’re particularly proud of, or wish people would take more note of?

John: “Proud of” makes it feel like I made something — I’m just telling you the things our guys have worked on. But I do a lot of training, so there are things I wish people realized were really useful.

One thing that keeps coming up, not in a major way but in a really useful way, is the Jump Bar. It’s annoyingly hard to find in the interface — you just press J and it pops up, like Spotlight search on a Mac. For new people: if you can’t find something, press J and start typing what you want. The Jump Bar will surface it; you can run it; you can set a shortcut if you want.

But if you only need something a few times for the next half hour, don’t set shortcuts for every possible thing. Use the Jump Bar. And it remembers the last command: next time you just press J, Enter, and it runs the same command again. That can be a really quick workflow: you don’t have to assign a shortcut, remember it, and so on. It’s useful for everybody — engravers, playback, composition — because you can use it for all sorts of things.

Philip: So it’s a way of interacting without going through menus or panels. And there are many panels.

I want to talk about something that’s been on everyone’s minds here: automation and intelligent tools — specifically AI. People are used to typing into chatbots — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude — and saying “How do I do X?” The next generation of users wants to type into the software in natural language, even just to use existing tools. How do you see that evolving? Is that something you’re thinking about?

John: Of course — especially at NAMM where AI comes up from various companies. Some people in creative industries are more worried about it than others. “AI” is a small word but it’s a big, broad area.

Some companies look at creating music as a problem they have to solve — and you kind of go, “Creating music is the fun thing we want to do; I don’t want an AI system to do that for me.” But there are specific things where you think, “That’s a bit of a drag; I don’t want to keep doing that.” The automation side should be things like renaming a whole bunch of things — the sort of thing we’d have written a script for.

Using AI as a tool so you can be more creative: you don’t want Dorico to suddenly write something in the style of something else — because that’s the interesting part you want to do. But if natural language tools can help you achieve something more easily — because you don’t know the terminology in Dorico or another software — then it’s our job to look at: how do we give an AI system “controls” to functions so it can run things or daisy-chain things together in your workflow to help you achieve and create more? Maybe it knows how to use the Jump Bar, or whatever, to do that.

But it’s early. People say “I typed this into an AI system and it says I need this button,” and we go, “That button doesn’t exist — it’s hallucination.”

Philip: That’s a big problem in all areas. I see Scoring Notes referenced and conclusions drawn that were never drawn.

John: And it scraped those systems a couple of years ago, so it’s an old manual, an old podcast…

Philip: But I’m talking about using it in a targeted way, like you described.

John: Students will tend to do that. In a DAW, if you want to EQ something, right now you need to know where the EQ is, how it works, what it does. Students are going to say, “EQ that to sound like this.” The system needs to know how to do it. There are advantages to knowing how it works, but that’s the way things are moving — controlling software to achieve what you need.

Philip: Even with sample libraries and realistic playback — we talked about the piano — that replaces in some cases a human-made instrument, a physical instrument, a human player, or both.

John: We use those so we can get an idea of what it sounds like now — because really what we want is to play it live. But also: sample libraries aren’t designed to use with notation software, and a notation user ends up doing programming bits to bend it to work. Maybe AI could do that bit for you.

And there are AI instruments coming out that might make existing sample-library companies worried.

Philip: If AI can model something and it’s less heavy — fewer gigabytes — that matters.

John: NAMM is useful because I can talk to third-party companies — things people want to use with Dorico — and how we can integrate better. A classic example: in the last few months, one live stream I did was about Synthesizer V — a VST instrument that sings lyrics. You can write notes and lyrics and it will sing them, instead of “ahh and ooh,” which has been the only option for years.

That helps me tell Dorico users how to use it, what the benefits are, what issues there might be. They’ve done a new choir version — which is what people want — and I’ve had conversations here saying: for our specific use case, here’s something that would be useful that’s missing.

And that is an AI system — they might not say it all the time, but that’s one use of AI.

Philip: Dorico is music scoring software. Scores can be notated scores, audio scores — everything. We have to reset expectations of what our goal is. You could have a quaint notion: sheet music played by human performers in a human environment — but that ship sailed long ago.

John: We’ve been saying for a while: “More time for music.”

Philip: And I agree — but sometimes in orchestration or transcription you have a secondary string pad — and the interesting part isn’t writing string pads. Where do you draw the line?

John: Dorico can already do that without AI — in certain ways. Lots of AI conversations are trying to find out what people actually want: is it making library music quicker? Is it something else? Is it something we even should be doing?

I’ve noticed bands releasing albums deliberately saying: these are played by real players — not programmed — leaving in some raw mistakes or timing issues to prove it’s real people. That’s a reaction to smooth, polished results.

People still show up to live performances, and that’s not going to change. But there’s also something nice about a polished recording where rough edges are smoothed out and an artist says: “This is my definitive representation.”

John: How many times have you been to a gig and thought it doesn’t sound like the album, or you didn’t like something? Sometimes you do want the polished version.

Philip: Have you considered bringing proofreading into an AI system?

John: Potentially. People presume it is AI — and it isn’t. It’s “human intelligence.” If you went to do a music degree, those are the things you’d be told: orchestration, “that’s a stretch on a violin,” and so on. A lot of those aren’t ambiguous — you can program in “of course it should be like this,” so you don’t need an online AI system to tell you.

There may be other areas — maybe playback. We have someone working with us at the moment — Robert — who did some things with Finale as well, and he’s looking at playback. Sometimes you want to be specific; sometimes you want it to sound natural and expressive. It doesn’t necessarily need AI, but there are situations where AI could be useful — where you get the same result every time and it might be nice to have another aspect.

But we’re careful, and talking to people: what do they actually want? There are potentially environmental aspects too. It’s a small acronym but a big area.

Philip: I do feel it’s something that sooner or later needs to be incorporated into notation software for the next generation of users. You can’t expect they’ll want to learn Dorico the way we learned Finale 20 years ago.

So: how do you keep the software approachable — for a first-time user, or for someone who used Finale for 30 years and now comes to Dorico?

John: Design-wise, we’ve always had a lot of thought in how things are structured. People have ideas about what would work better; should learning aspects be in the program or separate?

A useful thing about learning guides being separate is we can update them at a different pace than the program. We don’t have to release a new version just to give you a new learning tool.

One thing I’m doing at the moment is redoing our resources area so you can find resources more easily. When someone does a new course or a new video, we can incorporate it without updating the program.

There are learning tools in the program too, but it’s always a challenge: if we put in a new button, where does it go? Will it affect anything else? How do people find it?

People learn software once, but sometimes you come back to it and need to relearn things. A lot of the power of Dorico is how quickly you can do things when you need to get the job done on a deadline. Maybe it could handhold more in cases, but we’re trying to signpost resources better. And you don’t want it every day saying “How do you do this thing?”

Philip: The whole point is “More time for music,” not more time reading the software manual.

John: (laughs) I’ll tell them.

Philip: At NAMM there’s the pro-audio aspect. We saw Fender repackage Fender Notion alongside Fender Studio. We have Cubase and Dorico — probably the tightest integration of classic desktop applications. How do you account for that? Are you getting specific feedback about people using Dorico and Cubase together?

John: There are probably more DAW users than notation users, if you categorize people that way. People are probably nicer in person than online — but I’ve had people stop me, and they want to tell me something they enjoyed or liked.

The fact that our notation engine is inside Cubase does change the workflow for some people. In some cases they might not realize it’s in there. It’s the last two versions — Cubase 14 and 15 — and they might not know, or might not have thought about that way of working.

Training is often: people think they need to do something one way, but there might be another way or another way of thinking they haven’t considered.

It also feels good and stable for our team that Dorico is part of Cubase. It puts us in a good place and puts users in a good place for how they can interact with things. And people will tell us they have another idea for how it could work. We have discussions about things that might synchronize better, or other features they want.

Philip: Do you have a way of prioritizing the feedback you get here? Do you come back from NAMM and say “I heard this great idea”?

John: Certainly. And alongside online comments — don’t worry if you’re not at NAMM and haven’t given us your idea.

We might also see another product doing a little thing that could be useful, or see workflows people are interested in.

Because we’re in LA and the people here, there are really good conversations about film scoring workflows — that’s why we come in person.

Philip: Anything specific you’ve taken from the film scoring world?

John: There always are. Understanding different teams and workflows, hearing about particular projects. I’m interested to be more of a fly on the wall — not necessarily to get involved — but to see what they’re doing.

Sometimes they’ve done it a certain way for a long time because they know exactly what the process is. But sometimes: do we need to adjust something to help that workflow, or can we already do something they haven’t thought of?

Also, Steinberg doesn’t do hardware anymore. There are new Yamaha interfaces that used to have Steinberg badging, but now it’s moved to Yamaha. There’s a new CC controller. It’s also about how you interact with hardware — Stream Decks, controllers — those can make a big difference to workflow. NAMM is useful for that too.

Philip: Film scoring in the studio world is about speed: deadline and money. Time is the finite resource. Anything you can do to make the process faster matters.

John: It feels cyclical, but the Proofreading panel saves time for some people. It points out things that would come up in a rehearsal — missing dynamics, particular issues. People say: “It doesn’t matter how many times I looked at this — it points it out.” Or they open an old project and go, “How did I miss that? This has already been printed.”

For film scoring especially, it’s not going to be published — you print it once, play it, and it’s done. Saving that time means you don’t have people saying “I can’t play this” or “I’m not sure,” and you’ve lit a hundred-dollar bill on fire — or more.

Philip: As we wrap up: anything else you want people to understand about your plans for the coming year, short-term or long-term?

John: We will have a new update — a point release — coming out. We don’t ever say times, but maybe next month or so. It will add improvements to things we’ve already done, and probably add something where somebody goes, “You mean you’ve just dropped that into a point release?” Yes, probably.

That’s the next short-term bit. Then there are discussions: other factors might influence things — it might depend on something else — or it might be a longer time while we look into bigger things. It’s going to be an exciting year.

Philip: Excellent. It always is.

On that note, John Barron — it’s always fun and a privilege and a pleasure to see you.

John: Always great to see you.

Philip: I’m always coming away from NAMM energized about where our field is going. We had a nice time with colleagues — everybody in a room talking shop — what could be better?

John: Yeah. Indeed.

Philip: Thank you John — wishing you all the best for the coming year, and I’m sure I’ll talk to you again soon.

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Keep coming back to Scoring Notes for more coverage from the 2026 NAMM Show.