Change order of tied notes fails

I really need to have the highlighted notes (see image) to be tied vice-versa (1/8+1/32, for legibility) of what Dorico insists, but even if I split that tie and rebuild the note order, as soon as a hit tie command the same “wrong” order is applied. How can I override tie order in that case? This is in 6/4 time.
tied_wrong_order.jpg

Use forced duration
Re-enter the notes
Apply the tie as you enter the notes (not after entering them all)

Even though you will not see the tie until you enter the second note, Dorico has been primed to draw it.

ties.png

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You need to “force duration” on the notes before you tie them together. Select the notes and press O, or press O before you enter the notes. Press O again to switch force duration off when you don’t need it - the “G clamp” icon on the left side of the screen shows when it is on.

Thanks guys!

Lots of clicks and such but it looks now as it should be (and I wonder why Dorico does not default to that notation in the first place). Luckily the score is not full of those :wink:
fixed.jpg

It’s “lots of clicks” to fix it after you got the wrong notation by default (especially if you try a few ways that don’t work!) but while you are entering the notes the only extra “clicks” are O to switch force duration on, and O to switch it off again.

This music came via midi import ( I compose in Cubase, notate in Dorico). The beaming was another matter, the tied notes refused to break beam when force duration was on.

For the record, lacking no obvious (without reading the manual and writing to a forum) way to swap two notes horizontally, is not what I personally consider a user-friendly design. You of course know how to do it just like that :slight_smile:

PS. I found another way to swap them without deleting: namely go to chord mode and move the notes up/down then 1/32 back and forth, up/down to correct pitch, then adjust lengths, then beam, then force lengths, then tie. Easy?

Now we know it came from MIDI, is the real problem that Dorico is trying too hard to quantize it and represent the rhythm exactly? It’s your music not mine, but would two 8th notes (G and F) have been a more practical notation for a human player?

Dorico can still preserve the exact MIDI playback when the notation is simplified, if you want to do that.

This is slow tempo melody and meant to be that way, two eight notes is not the same. If that is hard to read by a professional solo flutist, well, d’oh! I do work with world class flutists every week. We play stuff like Ades without problems, too :slight_smile:

OK, I get the message. I’ll crawl back under my rock and leave you to bask in your own self-importance.

I personally think “swapping two notes horizontally” is not really a standard operating procedure or requirement for a notation program. Pekka - I am not trying to be offensive here, please don’t misunderstand me. :smiley:

??? So what exactly did I do to offend you? I’m a professional musician, if that annoys you then I have no idea why. Sorry.

Pekka, your tone could be interpreted as a little difficult. I’ve not pitched in on this thread up to this point because I’m anxious I’d get my head bitten off. It may be a language thing, I guess, but there are certain things that, regardless of anything else, just seem unreasonable to me. For example, I don’t think Dorico, Sibelius or Finale have intuitive ways of respelling rhythms without the user resorting to a forum or the manual, but you seem to expect them to. Does Cubase have such a thing? Does Cubase spell the rhythms the way you want? If so, you might try exporting MusicXML rather than MIDI.

I apologize for my tone. It is not intended to be hostile or nasty.

For the record, I was not requesting “respelling rhythms” in general, just reversing notes inside a tie. The musical result is identical if it is a tied (1/16 and 1/8) or (1/8 + 1/16), but when there are dynamics or other performance notes added it makes a world of difference. This should not be unreasonable request, sorry if it is. In a text editor you can change “I am” to “am I” by simply selecting and dragging.

I am learning how Dorico thinks, though. Today I needed to change 2/4 and 9/16 bars to 3/4 and 5/16. This was done by

  • change 9/16 to 1/16
  • change 2/4 to 3/4
  • change the last five 1/16’s to 5/16
  • delete that 1/16 time signature

    What I would like to suggest is a feature where you can select bars → “change time-signatures”, user could then change time-signatures inside those bars and Dorico would warn if the result will have orphan notes/rests and offers and option to correct that, then user submits the command.

Or, even easier, drag a barline to left or right and Dorico would change the time signatures when mouse is released, or warn that there is no possible time-signature for this barline position.

If you’d been entering notes directly into Dorico, you might have realised by now that Dorico generally does a better job at spelling ties than any other notation software. I say “generally” because there are exceptions (as you’ve discovered). Dorico already respells ties automatically, dependent on precisely where in a beat or a bar (in a specific time signature) the notes are. Look at what happens to these quavers/eighths if I shuffle them along:

It’s fair to request a feature to “reverse notes” inside a tie, but it strikes me as incompatible with general beaming rules, most of which Dorico automatically gets right. It also gets much more complicated when you’ve got tied notes that have more than two tied notes.

Take this (admittedly unusual) example:

If you swapped the first two notes round, what would you want Dorico to do with the others? If you swapped the first and fourth notes, would you want Dorico to fix the middle ones or ignore the fact that it was going against convention or hiding the middle of the bar? Music is [i[so[/i] much more complicated than text.

As to your example sequence, you’ve not used the fastest route by any means. How about this?