7:8 tuplets in two voices and beaming

[christopherberg]

Hi,

I purchased Dorico as soon as it was released. I was impressed and looked forward to exploring all that it to offer. I have kept it updated and am using Dorico Pro 3. However, I had a large book in progress when Dorico 1 was released and the 100-plus scores and examples in that were created in another program. That book is due out in a few weeks and I’m now working on typesetting some guitar music in Dorico.

I know that Daniel mentions in “Four simple guidelines to help us help you” to post a project and not a screen shot, but I’ve been trying to learn how to do something before I put it in the score and have a “scratch project” in which I’ve been experimenting. The screenshot is the closest I’ve come to what I want to do. (I’m also attaching a screen shot from the manuscript.)

I have searched the forum for discussions of similar problems but a lot of the discussions about tuplets have to do with entering them or changing the bracketing. This piece has an arpeggio section of 7:8 tuplets with the bass notes as a virtual second voice (not uncommon in guitar music). What I want to do is to split the beam for the lower voice at the start of each beat (it’s in 4/4), but can’t seem to do that. The options under “Beaming” (e.g., “Split secondary beam”) don’t do anything, even ensuring I had the note in the red voice selected before I changed the column index and merged the noteheads. I’ve tried this in both Write and Engrave modes.

I seem to have all the correct note values but am a little puzzled why there’s a “7” spanning two beats in the lower voice.

Here’s the same in the manuscript:

Getting this far has taken some time but has not been in vain because, well, I’ve gotten this far…

Can anyone point me to the (perhaps) simple thing I’ve missed?

Christopher

[dbudde]

I would approach this by using the same 7:8 32nd note tuplets in both voices and then just change the durations of the notes in the bass voice after the tuples is created.

[pianoleo]

I don’t think youre missing anything; if you really do have just the downstem note selected, you should be able to split the beam correctly. It works fine here:

If you follow dbudde’s approach you avoid having to do this step.
Also, there’s a setting at Notation Options > Voices > Ordering Multiple Voices (the last one in that section) that allows noteheads of opposing dotted and undotted voices to overlap, globally - no need to set Voice Column Indexes locally.

[rpearl]

I assume you want this:

I found it easiest to do it once, the copy-repeat. Change pitches as you like. I did hit some odd snags with the tuples in the lower voice being longer than I wanted. but, if you get it once, you can simply repeat it.

[christopherberg]

Hi, Ron,

Yes, I had planned to get it done once and then paste and change pitches as needed. You’ve got just what I’m trying to do, although I find the “7” in the lower voice to be unnecessary for the player. I was able to split the beam easily after seeing pianoleo’s instructions.

/cb

[pianoleo]

You can hide the tuplet bracket/number from the properties panel.

[christopherberg]

Many, many thanks for everyone’s responses. These were quite helpful and I figured out how to get rid of the number for the tuples in the lower voice:

Thank you,

/cb