Cubase 14’s Score Editor puts the power of Dorico in the DAW

Steinberg has recently released version 14 of Cubase, their venerable digital audio workstation (DAW). And you, dear reader, might reasonably be wondering why you’re reading about a DAW in the pages of Scoring Notes. After all, if you’ve ever seen the notation output of Logic Pro, Pro Tools, or even earlier versions of Cubase, you will know that these are not exactly paragons of engraverly virtue. The newly-released Cubase 14 offers a Dorico-based score editor that is — for perhaps the first time in a traditional DAW — capable of producing a score that will look like it belongs on a music stand.

This may not seem like a big deal to those of us who live and breathe staff notation all day, but for many musicians, the waveforms and MIDI “piano roll” of the DAW project is where music begins and ends. This includes musicians who work in a huge number of media scoring and commercial music practices, for whom staff notation is, at best, an afterthought. These are users who would not have the inclination to buy — to say nothing of the time to learn — notation software. Instead, they export notation from the DAW and hope it makes sense to players. (Narrator: “It does not.”)

For musicians who are primarily score-focused, the occasional foray into the world of MIDI and DAWs can be overwhelming and off-putting, or at least unfamiliar. Those users often think in terms of staff notation for their music and have a difficult time entering and manipulating music represented on a MIDI grid. Having a familiar set of music symbols can allow them a much greater degree of facility in a new-to-them context.

This article is not a review of Cubase 14; I’ll leave that to audio production and sequencing professionals. Instead, I want to explore the Score Editor from my perspective as a (mostly) traditional, dots-and-lines-composers who spends hours each day in Dorico and other notation software.

From Dorico to Cubase

While Cubase has had a Score Editor since the early 1990s, the new Dorico-based Score Editor shares seemingly no connection other than the name. Users who have experience in Cubase 13’s Score Editor will likely need to spend time relearning the tool in Cubase 14. However, users who have spent time with Dorico will likely find some familiar landmarks and design elements.

Right away, you can see Dorico’s core layout engine at work. I (and others) have long considered the quality of Dorico’s automatic spacing and layout to be one of the applications greatest strengths, and that’s particularly important in the context of a DAW, where users are less likely to be inclined toward tweaking such things. Most Cubase users are going to be focusing on a different set of priorities than most Dorico users.

As a regular Dorico user, I found these familiarities to be sometimes comforting and other times frustrating, as they can create some false friends. For example, some tools on the right panel in Dorico can be found in the left panel in Cubase; some things on the left in Dorico have their functions across the top of the Cubase Score Editor. The biggest inconvenience I found was the different keyboard shortcuts between Cubase and Dorico. This is totally understandable, as Cubase has its own deep and powerful set of shortcuts that the Score Editor can’t conflict with, but it often had me spending a lot more time clicking than I would like when using this sort of software. Some things like navigating with the caret, changing note durations, etc. seem to really require clicking. There are also no popovers, so all meter changes, tempos, etc. are a bit tedious.

Recording and quantization

Having said that, I think the strengths of the Cubase Score Editor have always been in displaying a score version of MIDI data that has been recorded from a controller — usually a piano keyboard. Subtle deviations in timing and velocity that come from a human performance can be cleaned up through quantization, but often are kept for their expressive value. “Display quantization” has long been an important feature of the Cubase Score Editor, and the quality of the notation and engraving from Cubase 14 makes it even more valuable than before. I see this as a cousin of the sound/score toggle in Dorico’s Key Editor. It allows users to have a clean, clear score while maintaining the expression of the recorded performance.

One of the most interesting new features to the Score Editor is the ability to interpret articulations from performances as well. I found this to be a bit hit-and-miss, as it really required the MIDI performance to be rather exaggerated, but it’s a very good start when inputting a lot of music. I can see this being a significant time-saver for many users.

There are many new components to the Score Editor that simply weren’t possible in previous versions of Cubase. There is simply more of everything: playing techniques, dynamics, ornaments, articulations, and even repeat structures. One small change I’ve really appreciated is how much easier it is to enter meter changes. By making this more straightforward in the Score Editor, I no longer have to switch modes over to the Tempo Track Editor, as I did in Cubase 13 when writing music with lots of changes. And just like in Dorico, changing the time signature for a measure with notes in it will intelligently update the rhythm notation to match. I imagine this sort of feature being extremely useful for working with recorded MIDI performances that change meters.

It’s a small thing, but I think my favorite feature of the Cubase 14 Score Editor is the Page View and Fill View toggle. In Fill View, the score will instantly adapt to fill the size of the Score Editor window any time the window changes size, re-flowing the music to the new system length without changing the staff size, a bit like a responsive web page that adapts to a phone, tablet, or laptop screen. In the pages and podcasts of Scoring Notes, we’ve occasionally discussed a hypothetical future of adaptive scores on screens, and we’ve even seen a few swings at this in some iPad score readers. However, all those iterations have lacked Dorico’s high-quality layout and spacing engine. Seeing it here is the first time I’ve been optimistic that such a flexible score document is usable possibility.

As with any feature or application that is rebuilt from the ground up, existing users may notice a small handful of feature regressions. One that I think is notable is that tablature has been removed, though it is planned to make a return in a later update. And in general, as powerful and impressive as the Cubase 14 Score Editor is, if you’re the sort of person who reads Scoring Notes (and if you’re reading this sentence, you are), you’ll likely run up against some tweak to layout, notation, or engraving that isn’t possible in Cubase. (Dear god, won’t anyone think of the fonts?!)

There and back again

If you do need those tweaks, that’s the point at which notation software will need to take over. In some cases, this is likely going to mean a MIDI or MusicXML export to another application, which is a far-from-perfect process. Another extremely handy feature of Cubase 14 is the ability to export to the native Dorico file format, which will include all of the information input in the Score Editor. Notably, this is a one-way-trip. The reverse — moving a file from Dorico to Cubase — is still a little trickier.

Availability and conclusions

Cubase 14 is available now, and the new Score Editor is included in every product in the family (Elements, Artist, and Pro). A free 60-day trial version is available.

If you already have Cubase 13 or earlier, updates are available from the Steinberg online shop. Anyone who first activated a Cubase 13 license on or after October 8, 2024, is entitled to a free grace period update.

Full retail prices in the US are as follows; your price may vary by region or currency:

• Cubase Elements 14: $100
  • Educational discount (proof of eligibility required): $67
  • Update from Cubase Elements 13: $30
• Cubase Artist 14: $330
  • Educational discount (proof of eligibility required): $200
  • Update from Cubase Artist 13: $80
• Cubase Pro 14: $580
  • Educational discount (proof of eligibility required): $360
  • Update from Cubase Pro 13: $100

Although this is not the interoperability that many users have hoped for, it is a significant step toward a future where Cubase and Dorico can be used in tandem. I obviously don’t know how much literal code is shared between the two applications, but having similar data models and tools may lay the groundwork for projects that move between Cubase and Dorico with less friction in the future. For Cubase users who sometimes need good notation, there may be some projects that can be printed straight out of Cubase. For most projects, though, this is perhaps the best incentive yet for Cubase users to pick up a copy of Dorico over Sibelius. For Dorico users like me who sometimes work in a DAW, this is a great reason to consider Cubase over Logic Pro.