2 note lengths in one voice. Weird behaviour?

Dorico
#1

Hello

As a classical guitarist I’m well used to using 2 or 3 voices on one stave.
I also realise that if you have two different note lengths in one voice, the longer note will get broken and tied so that both notes share a common length and the longer note extends on further.

Here’s what I mean…

Quaver.png
Quaver.png742×347 11.8 KB

If I touch either note, Dorico correctly shows the length of that note.

If I touch the quaver B and then touch in the left panel, or hit “6”, it turns into a crotchet as I’d expect.
But the G turns into a quaver. Er ???. If I then turn the G back into a crotchet, the B becomes a quaver.

I can work round it, but am I missing something here?

Thanks!

#2

You’re not missing anything. It’s behaved like this for as long as I can remember, and I’ve always found it a bit odd as well.

#3

Thanks Dan - as I said, I can work round it, so I’ll get right back to what I was working on!

Your prompt reply is much appreciated…

#4

By coincidence, I decided to look into and try to fix this behaviour this past weekend (I really know how to party). The problem is that Dorico ends up overwriting the portion of the other note or notes in the chord, because that’s normally what would happen to any notes that are affected by extending the length of an earlier note (e.g. if you have a quarter note followed by a dotted half note, select the quarter note and make it into a half note, the following dotted half note gets eroded and becomes a half note). But Dorico isn’t currently clever enough to know that it shouldn’t do this to other notes in the same chord as the one you lengthened.

The long and the short of it is that I was able to fix this, and in future versions of Dorico, when you select a chord consisting of different durations and specify a new duration, all of the notes in the chord will end up with the expected duration.

#5

Thanks for your response Daniel and for the positive news that came along with it. Let me assure you that you now know for sure that you didn’t waste your weekend - thank you!

#6

I find when I am in the midst of writing–when I am doing something I love–I lose track of time. I’d say that is very much an example of “knowing how to party.”

“Party on!”