I am converting JS Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Mans Desiring” from an organ arrangement I created years ago in Finale. Famously, the chorale theme is noted in 3/4 time while the counter melody is in 9/8. This was not a problem in Finale, but I am having difficulty in Dorico.
I can easily make some staves in 3/4 while the top one remains in 9/8 - but the bar lines do not line up! Here is a screen shot:
What appears to me missing is a way to tell Dorico that the eight ate pulse in the staves is NOT the same. I might fix this buy converting lots of the top line to triplets and suppressing the “3” labels - but that seems like a very messy process. I’d like to think that Dorico has a way of handling this without resorting to lots of hidden score items.
In your case: enter the first 3/4 bar as 3/4,4.5, the next bar as (9/8), and enter all the notes in these bars under 6:9e tuplets, and use Force Duration:
Agree with @charles_piano , but I think it is less effort to have the base time signature as 3/4. and set the 9/8 line as tuplets (for this particular piece).
@ljdeutsch In that case there will just be one small difference: the 9/8,6 bar won’t be included in the bar numbering (because it’s shorter than 9/8, unlike 3/4,4.5 which is longer than 3/4).
So you’ll need to select it, enable Group bar as pickup bar in the Properties Panel, and leave the checkbox empty.
Thank you all for responding so quickly. Charles_piano’s solution works well - though this is still a lot more work than I had to do in Finale! Hopefully, some of the authors of Dorico might be reading this and consider it a challenge for the next release. I can think of many examples in classical music where such time signatures are used simultaneously.
I thought I might have another solution: I considered using 9/12 rather than 9/8 with the theory being that Dorico would align the resulting measures correctly since 9/12 = 3/4 mathematically. However, this did not work!
I am editing my score now, chosing to re-enter all the 3/4 notes. since there are not a lot of them compared to the 9/8 notes. Here is the same passage as I posted yesterday, corrected:
Yep! However, this might provide a pathway for Dorico to better-handle problems like mine. If they treated 9/12 different than 9/8, I could have used 9/12 to solve my problem and then forced Dorico to display 9/8 in its place.
As Dorico thinks in absolute durations rather than in bars like Finale this is unlikely going to happen.
It’s less effort if you leave the main time signature in 3/4 and set independent time signatures for the 9/8 staves with a 9/8,6 pickup for the 1st bar and an hidden 3/4 for the subsequent bars applying triplets.
