Is there a way to let a cue be written in concert pitch when this cue is appearing in a transposing instrument?
The only other instruments playing are the high woodwinds a couple of bars before the horn in F starts, but using this cue gives a lot of ledger lines which could be avoided if the cue could be written in concert pitch:
I found the solution: Octave shift in the properties panel! Creating cues was never so easy and fun before. This is a large score and with the help of the Suggest Cue option, it is going very fast.
No, thatâs not possible, on a transposing instrument (in transposing layout) the cue will be always transposed. What you can do however to avoid ledger line is to use the cue âOctave shiftâ property,
Yes, that is what I did (see previous post). Thanks.
Oh I see, I havenât seen your second post. Iâm glad you enjoy the cue feature.
Itâs finally not a struggle anymore to create them and getting lost in a large score because the suggest feature keeps track. Very nice! The only issue just now was that Dorico became unresponsive when I tried to hide the key in the properties panel. I had to force quit, but nothing was lost. I could not repeat this glitch so maybe it was a one time problem only.
I cues the full score in about 2 hours this morning. This would have normally taken me at least a whole day. Big time saver!
Hello
Are there plans to have the option to show the cue in C in transposing parts in a future update?
I would definitively be glad to. For the only way I see how to do it, is to write a hand transposed âcueâ as a second voice, change the size as âcue sizeâ, hoping I dinât make any mistake, so that the âcueâ is shown as if itâs in âCâ in the transposed part. And thatâs time consuming.
But for the most part, I really enjoy the way Dorico manage cues. Thank you!
Seconded. There are publishers who require this, though the rationale is a mystery to me. I canât imagine what horn or clarinet players think of their cues when this is done.
At the moment we do not have any plans for this. It sounds horribly confusing. Perhaps we can persuade these publishers to stop the insanity rather than adding unhelpful features to our scoring software? 
Youâre right! âÂĄViva la revoluciĂłn!â
Sorry to dig up an old thread. I actually would find this useful in the score Iâm currently working on. I have an alto flute part in a song cycle, and I would like to cue the solo voice on an ossia staff at sounding pitch. See the attached screenshot. I think itâs really confusing in rehearsal when the flute player is seeing this cue transposed up a fourth.
It doesnât matter if you think itâs confusing. What matters is if the flute player thinks itâs confusing!
Assuming your screen shot is consistent (either both staves are at concert pitch or both transposed) it is obvious from the cue that the singer is an octave below the flute. If he singer is really at a different pitch, the player is probably going to wonder who has gone wrong when what he/she sees doesnât match what he/she hears!
Relevant excerpt from Gouldâs Behind Bars, pg. 574:
A cue should be transposed into the key of the playing instrument, as if the player is to play the cue.
Yes, and the MOLA guidelines are for orchestral parts. This is a chamber song cycle that is quite different in nature.
In this context, I think it makes more sense to show the sounding pitch of the voice part and the piano part. While I agree that it is ordinarily correct to show the cue transposed for the instrument part, in this case, the cues are all on a separate staff, which to my mind changes the expectation significantly.
Well, you donât have to convince us you know better than Gould and MOLA - especially since nobody here is likely to play the flute part, however you decide to notate it!
Pierrot Lunaireâs clarinet part has vocal cues in C. Some Mahler as well. Though I still think itâs bad form from the publisher to want this, you can add a cue line on a C instrument (trombone in this case - renamed âCueâ. This player would not appear in the full score (it does in my example, but thatâs just to illustrate), but would be in the transposed Alto flute part, with that staff reduced in size and hide instruments set to âalwaysâ. You can then copy cues at will from the desired instruments to the cue line. Not interactive, but since you are a t engraving stages, I doubt that it matters much.
PL is published by Universal, and Universalâs house style requires all cues in C even today. It makes no sense to me: the player needs to be shown as clearly as possible what to listen for, and printing a cue in C when the instrument being cued is pitched in some other key adds pointless complication.
Iâm not saying that I âknow betterâ than Gould or MOLA, I certainly donât. Iâm saying that the kinds of cues Iâm using in the example here are fundamentally different in ways that I clearly laid out than the kinds of cues imagined by the MOLA guide. They are on a different staff. If they were on the same staff as the players part, I would agree that they should be transposed as though they were the flute part.
I agree that nearly all cues should be transposed for the part they appear in, and that should absolutely be the default. However, I think this is a reasonable example of an instance where they might not make sense transposed. These cues are only for coordination in passages where rhythm is either free or complex; they appear on a separate staff; and one of the parts is for voice. Another concern is that this is a large transposition (up a fourth), and so it creates a lot more ledger lines than it would to leave the part at sounding pitch. The bottom line here is that this whole part is much more like a score that has some special affordances to be played by the flute player than most parts.
Last, Iâm not trying to convince anyone here that this should be the way they show cues, or even that what I want to do is ok, just that this should be something that is allowed by the software, which should enable users to do whatever it is they are trying to do, not what it thinks they are trying to do.
