This is something that comes up a lot for me, and maybe there’s something I don’t understand about dynamics and group behaviour. I find hairpins often end up attached somewhere bars ahead of where I’m working, even when I originally entered it as a much shorter duration. Sometimes I need to make a change, and when I ungroup a hairpin, it suddenly becomes 3 times as long. Then when I shorten it and reattach to the group, I seems to reattach itself to the same distant barline. I don’t think I’m explaining this well but the gif demonstrates what I mean.
I see this behavior a lot in scores I receive from others. The thing you need to understand is that, while grouping a hairpin and dynamic might make it seem like the hairpin is the correctengtg, you need to look to see where the actual start and end points are. Sometimes the anchor point for the hairpin might be much later than it appears visually. I think this is generally a result of incorrect entry initially.
Or maybe a better way to say it is that you need to look for the “semantic” length of the hairpin, not just how long it appears to be visually. When you remove the grouping, you are seeing the hairpins “true” position.
I see, I guess I’m not sure what I’m doing to cause it. I usually enter dynamics with the popover. The hairpin in the gif was entered with the popover for 3 measures, so I’m not sure how it became 11 measures!
Edit: I meant to say I enter dynamics with the caret/popover.
I’d need to see the project. I’m confident there’s a good explanation for this. I’m not saying it’s PEBCAK, but I do think dynamics and hairpin grouping is predictable in general.
I think the problem is with the group, because what I’ve found is that even if I delete the p, something else in the chain will become attached to the distant barline. I tried ungrouping and making sure everything was attached where it should be, and re-grouped it, which fixed the problem, but I’m still not sure how I got into the situation in the first place, and it keeps happening again and again. Hopefully I’ll get to the bottom of it!
I tend to think it’s PEBCAK, but in this case I haven’ t been able to discover what I’m doing wrong, despite my best efforts to thoroughly study this stuff. I often compose in Dorico, so things get changed a lot from their original form. It’s probably something I’m doing in the process of editing.
I’ve caught Dorico in the act of changing my dynamics anchor points, I’d like to understand why. In this example I have a group where everything seems to be anchored correctly. After I go and make a slight adjustment to a p in Play Mode, when I return to Write Mode the p is suddenly anchored way off. Not to mention my bar rests have disappeared even though ends voice was never selected, and is still not selected, but that’s another problem. I’m stumped.
