I want Dorico to display a dotted half note tied to an eight note as it does below (I had to use force duration here). Is there a setting somewhere that makes this standard? Force duration works as it should, but it’s tedious to use when I know this will happen several times in this arrangement.
I suppose the setting would be in ‘Note Grouping’ in notation options, but I can’t seems to find any that works. Any ideas?
This is a limitation, for now.
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Aha, seems others had the same issue. Thanks! Now I at least know I why I couldn’t find a relevant setting.
The quickest way for this that I have figured out is just to write a dotted half, highlight it, turn on Force Duration (O), and extend it’s length by grid with Cmd+Shift+right arrow (having set grid resolution to eighths). Still a lot of steps but fewer than all the other options.
But yes, I have been waiting for this option to be natively integrated for quite a long time now as well.
(You could also record a script for this)
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I wonder how a native option could be significantly faster than this? You’d have to create it anyways, which you can’t do in one keystroke… you’d have to input the dotted half and extend it. Requires barely an effort to press O before you lengthen it.
The native solution would speed up my workflow tremendously because I deal with a lot of imports of MIDI files which I currently need to go through manually to adjust these instances.
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That particular rhythm is one keystroke for me 
I use that one a lot so created a Stream Deck button to do it. I’m always inputting with pitch before duration so it was pretty easy to set up.
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Not what you’re asking for, but there are Notation Options to automatically get this, which is at least better than your top example anyway IMO.
MET and a fairly well-known composer’s FB feed were full of discussions of some of these rhythms that cross the mid-bar last week. There was so much misinformation and so many people espousing their particular house style as a rule that I sorta quit following those threads, but regardless Dorico really should offer some options here.
Carl Rosenthal’s book has this prescription, which I usually call the “1-2-1 rule.” Basically in a duple meter, a note half the value of the bar can always come a quarter of the way through the bar.
I like this rule as I think the eye can always clearly parse that division. The catch is what do you do with a tie into it or out of it? Should it be handled the same way? (I think no, many think yes.)
If we take for granted that the following rhythm is correct (I’m really not interested in arguing this one) …
… then which of these are still correct?
What about this lovely example which logically follows if you’re ok with #3 above?
These examples were argued for days last week on those threads, LOL! (Personal opinion: Trailing syncopations are ok. For initial syncopations go up 2 levels so an 8th syncopation needs to show the half note division, which is the half bar in 4/4.) I’m definitely not interested in restarting all of those arguments, but wanted to point out that there are quite a few scenarios that should be accounted for in Notation Options if these are to be revisited in a future version.
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I’ve seen these threads and discussions.
The argument for the rhythm notation that we’re talking about here however is not necessarily in order to notate a specific rhythm properly but to clarify the end points for notes. In my experience only the dotted half to tied over eighth will get you a clear cutoff on beat 4 from (hopefully) all musicians while with any other notation the end point becomes fuzzy.
So while there definitely can be a lot of arguments regarding how to notate these specific rhythms that cross the middle bar, the option we’re talking about here I think is universally accepted and the default to notate this specific end point of note.
It just seemed a bit bonkers to me that the MET gurus were stating their grouping opinions like they were universal laws, when in fact they are contradicting just about every engraving manual available. It’s totally fine if people want those groupings (the MET examples, not just the OPs here) and I fully agree Dorico should support those, but the weird groupthink over there is why I mostly keep away, LOL!
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The difference is in whether the tied-to note is considered a release note, as Robin mentioned. I see release-eighths as a practice mostly in band music and in British choral scores. So far Dorico has no provision whatsoever for this practice in terms of either playback or note grouping.
Some composers try to indicate the difference with a staccato dot, but this is a minority, so it can’t be relied on as a standard.
There is a mostly defunct (in my experience anyway) jazz tradition where something like the below example means “off on 4.”
If that’s something Dorico wants to support, then I guess those that adhere to that tradition can make their case.
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What’s the non-“de-funked” version of notating off on 4 in jazz, @FredGUnn — just a dotted half?
I would not agree that this is a defunct tradition, also in orchestra. As I mentioned above, in my experience only that notation in orchestral contexts in several locations so far gave me relatively consistent offs on 4, while anything else did not.
I do agree that also orchestral musicians (particularly in the media scoring world) have become way more aware of placing releases properly (and not just attacks) but with more traditional ensembles there often is a considerable neglect of release points where you need to notate fool-proof.
Yeah, I’d just use a dotted half. If it really needed to be exact, maybe add “-4” above it. I’d probably interpret the example I posted above as -4.5, not -4, but conventions vary I guess.
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The “-4” is not safe to to be universally understood. I actually had an ensemble of top tier String Players in London @ Abbey Road stumble over this and questioning what it meant.
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I’m glad to hear of your experience, @RobinHoffmann.
I suppose it’s fair to say that certain variations of notational practice might be standard among different “slices” of the musical world.
I have often written dotted-half-tied-to-eighth when I wanted the cutoff on beat 4 to be clear. But since some of my work is for (U.S.) jazz musicians, I valued hearing from @FredGUnn — who is very active both as jazz composer and live/studio performer — about what he’s seeing as the common practice.
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This is why I stayed out of the MET threads, LOL! I mean, sure, it’s easy to find sources for virtually any style of notation you want. I have almost 70 books on music notation, most of which address syncopation crossing a mid-bar in 4/4, and they are overwhelmingly in favor of showing it. I just picked 6 of the most famous and most respected guides in my hidden example above (Rosenthal, Roemer, Stone, Williams, Schirmer, Ross) but could probably easily look up a dozen more. The Brant example shows why Dorico should provide more options with this though!
Way too long off-topic hypothesizing
I’ve written about this before, but I’m fairly convinced that there was a codifying of notational habits in the 1950s-60s. During the heyday of the studio orchestra era, sightreading mistakes became either expensive (to do another take) or permanent. Thus notation styles evolved to greatly favor rhythmic groupings that facilitated sightreading. Things like flagged beaming for vocal writing started to subside, formerly odd but not uncommon things like a dotted quarter on beat 2 in 4/4 pretty much went away, single stemmed notes on the middle line switched to down, etc., all to favor the sightreader.
Somewhat surprisingly, there is a lack of notational guidance from many authors in the 1950s. Perhaps they were all too busy working! By the time many of the classic texts on notation came out in the 1960s and 70s (Rosenthal, Ross, Stone, Roemer, etc) they are all pretty much in agreement on this type of stuff, indicating to me that there was some industry-wide consensus on how to present music in a way that professionals could accurately sightread it.
There have also been many studies on how the eye perceives music, some even dating back to the 1920s! A common theme between many of the studies is that professionals do not merely read left to right as amateurs do, but process music in larger “chunks” of information. Here’s a snippet from the Goolsby 1994 study:
As professional players do not read left to right as amateurs do, but instead process rhythmic and melodic information in “chunks,” it is useful for the copyist to be aware of this and lay out the rhythmic “chunks” in the most familiar way possible. I think this is what all the copyists/authors in the 1950s-1990s era were hip to, and set about grouping rules to most accurately allow for the quick processing of rhythmic “chunks.”
There’s something to be said for showing the exact cutoff too I suppose, but modifying notation standards to allow for it does mess up how professionals are accustomed to visually processing rhythmic data. For very simple rhythms, it’s really just a house style issue, without much effect at all, but I’m still going to stick with the book examples I posted for the most part.
I do think a distinction can be made between whether the syncopation is anticipatory or trailing the longer note. If the longer note is on a strong beat and the syncopation is trailing, I don’t really have an issue with the longer note as the eye doesn’t need the mid-bar as a reference. I often use a dotted half tied to an eighth as my SD button shows. If that rhythm were reversed, I’ll usually show the mid-bar. I will certainly always show it if the syncopation is an anticipation and the longer note does not fill the bar as the eye can lose grounding without the mid-bar notated.
I’m sorta trying my best to hand off copying clients to my students, but I did a ton of copy work from 1995 until fairly recently. (Got sucked back in to do a huge ballet last spring too.) There’s always a balance to be struck between rules / house style / composer’s notation. It’s sometimes work to sort those out! For example, I was Gunther Schuller’s copyist the last few years of his life and often would challenge him on notation that I deemed “incorrect,” but he always had a rationale for notating things the way he did, so I always lost the battle, LOL! I probably would have fought Brant on his notation too, but would have obviously lost that as he does have a rationale for it, even if most sources disagree with it.
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Interesting conjecture! And I think that while your discussion (and inclusion of Goolsby) may certainly contain a healthy number of alpha-numeric characters, it is not really “too long” or OT, @FredGUnn.
I’ve always thought of standard “Western” musical notation as walking a tightrope, balancing between efficiency on the one side and clarity on the other.
Less visual information (like the OP’s dotted-half tied to an eighth) helps speed up the brain’s processing rate, but at a certain point the reduction in the number of symbols crosses over into obscuring the rhythm’s relationship to the meter/measure. (I, for one, do not believe that point is reached in this example, btw. How important is it, really, in that context to see beat 3…?)
Adding psychologists’ insights into the all-important factor of cognition and information processing is critical. After all, the rhythmic aspect of this kind of music notation abstracts considerably from being a “temporal ruler,” à la key/piano roll editors and other grids. We’re glad it does, of course, if for no other reasons than visual compression and paper savings, but it does mean we face some challenges in keeping things clear.
The gist that seems to be emerging (via “violent consensus” 
) in this and other related threads is that there are different perspectives on striking that balance, and we’d love it if Dorico offered them all! 
And I do think that acknowledging slight differences in common practice across different groups of reading musicians (genres, parts of the world, reading experience level, etc.) is worth keeping in mind. (For example, when I look at the way some of the highly syncopated rhythms of Afro-Latin musics are written, my own “always-show-the-half-bar-in-4/4,” etc., brain wiring can start to short-circuit.)
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