In this example the Horns and staves above are in 6/8 while the other staves are in 4/4.
There is one 4/4 bar for every four bars in 6/8, one measure of 4 quarter notes for four bars of 6/8.
Is this possible at this point in Dorico Pro? What is the best workaround you would use? This notations continues until the end of the piece. Thanks for any help you can give.
Hi Kevin. It is perfectly possible. It is not really a workaround, since it does work perfectly. It is described in a Scoring note article.
https://www.scoringnotes.com/tutorials/masking-meters-creating-polymeters-metric-modulations-dorico/
Thanks Marc for such a speedy response! I do read Scoring notes, do you remember the name of the article?
And there it is…thanks again!
I’ve put the link in my edited answer.
You should probably create a “hide tuplet numbers and hooks” macro. I use it very often — since this technique involves creating and hiding many tuplets.
I’m reading the article but still having problems actually making it work. I would like to keep the 6/8 as is to avoid those triplets but I’m not sure how to do the 4/4 meter…please expand if you can. One 4/4 measure has to equal 4 6/8 measures or 24/8 or 12/4 I guess, so would that be triplet of 4:12.
Math was never my best thing:)
So what’s really going on is this.
The notes in the 4/4 staff are really triplets because the measures actually only have 3 beats (to equal the length of the “real” 6/8. (You would use some other ratio of tuplet if you were trying to do something like 5/4 against 4/4 or something).
The first measure of the 4/4 section will be a pickup bar (Shift-M, 4/4,3) of 3 beats. This is just to get the symbol.
In the second bar, you create a time change to 6/8, and then hide it. So it looks like it’s in 4/4 still, but it’s not, it’s really in 6/8, again, to make it match up.
Then hide all the triplets and boom, it looks right, and plays back right.
It is a bit faffy and there certainly could be dedicated functionality to support this though.
If you want to keep your 6/8 as the “main” time signature, you’d have to do the following:
Create a local time signature (apply with alt-enter) for the strings with “4/4, 12”. This will create a “pickup bar” of length of 12 quarters, which will then result in the next barline lining up with the barline after 4 bars of 6/8.
Then, invoke the n-tuplet dialog and enter “4:12q”. This will give you 4 quarters in the time of 12 to work with.
From there, enter you quarters and hide the tuplet bracket and number.
Repeat for the other staves.
And as Tyle says, the following bars might be off. In your case, I think it’s safest just to create the same pickup bar in the next “bar” but hide the time signature.
