Can't control the tie durations

I have been unable to figure out how to make Dorico score a certain passage the way I want. I hope someone can tell me how. It just keeps forcing some rules onto the situation and I don’t know how to work around it.

Screen Shot 2021-03-18 at 3.45.49 PM

Basically I’m using two voices, so that I can have up stems on the upper voice and downstems on the lower voice. However, Dorico is handling the tie differently on the two voices. I’d prefer to see it as handled by the lower voice where the tie across the barline goes to a half note, tied to a dotted quarter… and I have tried to make it manually, but then Dorico will automatically change the upper voice back to double dotted half note after the barline.

what’s the trick to make the score the way I want it?

Hi !
Force duration takes a little practice to use it with expectable results. Here, untie the upstem voice bit you don’t like. Respell the double dotted half note as a simple half note. Now, select the quaver (A-D) before the barline and press o. Select the half note (A-D) after the barline and press o. Make sure your rhythmic grid is set to quaver (8th note). The rhythmic grid is the very useful thing that lies in the bottom left corner of Dorico’s window. Lengthen the half note (alt-shift-right arrow) three times. You now should have a half note tied to a dotted quarter note. Select the quaver before the line and tie, everything should stay as is (because every bit of the tie has received force duration).
There are other ways to get there, this one is just the first one I could think about :wink:

Also, there’s a setting to limit the number of dots to 1. I can’t remember where it is at the moment, but that would fix this problem quickly. Of course if you wanted double dots somewhere else in the project, that would be a difficulty.

There are different rules depending on whether the thing following is a note or a rest, or if the voice actually ends.

What happens in the final eighth/quaver of the bar?

Here is the complete bar. It switches from two voices to one…maybe that is why somehow?

I’ll play around with this to see if I can massage some forced durations…I think you’re saying to force the durations before tying them together so that rules won’t interject their own logic. yea?

You need force duration turned on at each step in the process, including when adding the ties.

well I found a way to bend the rules into submission. First…I ended the voice on the dotted quarter…(see previous image has a useless eighth rest). that alone at least made the two voices follow the same rules. I don’t know why an eight note would cause a double dotted half note while an eighth rest would allow tied half to dotted quarter. But in any case that did it.

I could potentially turn on the rule to not allow double dotted notes…which should make them both what I want in general.

I still will play around with the forced duration stuff because I want to understand how to manually make the score look as I want, whenever I want without the rules forcing otherwise…

If you look in Notation Options > Note Grouping, you’ll see that there are specific rules for what happen when a long note is followed by a rest. If you remove the rest (aka end the voice), that note is no longer followed by a rest.

do you have an idea which specific rule is applicable here?

I’m not in front of Dorico right now, I’m afraid. It also likely depends on whether it’s 2/2 or 4/4.

not a big deal, I’m just kind of curious. I think to get the most out of Dorico over time I need to become somewhat versant in the rules it will be applying

thanks for the insights.

Right. I surmise that your example is in 2/2. Unfortunately 2/2 isn’t well-handled by the Notation Options. My opinion(!) is that basically 3/2, 4/2, 5/2 etc. should be handled with one set of rules, and that 2/2 should be handled separately, basically the same way that 4/4 is handled - most 2/2 historically seems to be beamed and grouped as though it’s 4/4. Anyway, my feeling is that 2/2 is missing some settings (along with x/2 time signatures that don’t have a half bar, various compound meters etc.), and I know I’m not alone in hoping that they’re addressed in a future version of Dorico.

In the meantime, the only rule that helps you here is reducing the maximum allowable number of dots in simple time signatures from 2 to 1.

It’s somewhat fortuitous that today I thought of a new trick for persuading 2/2 to work like 4/4 (or rather, to persuade what is actually a 4/4 time signature to display as 2/2) - see A workaround for persuading Dorico 3.5 to beam/group 2/2 like 4/4

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