Hello,
quite often I can not decide, wether to end a choral setting with a Longa or a Maxima on the last chord.
I know, this is more for decorative reasons, but still: how does this look to you?
That looks like a longa to me.
1 Like
Yes Daniel, I tried the Longa - which looks somehow small in Dorico.
I don’t know whether this is intended, as I have not seen many of those…
[edit]: I have now custom scaled the last Longa note up to 116% and it looks ok.
You might want to create a Notehead set for final notes of this sort, so you can apply a fixed (and editable) style to all notes in one go.
Thank you Ben; I am still confused, are these values (Longa/Maxima) in the right proportion concerning there note head size? They don’t really seem to match the Bravura note head sizes up to that value.
Usually, the Longa is just a breve with a tail; the Maxima is an elongated version. Though it makes sense to make one of them obviously short and one obviously long. Here’s Thomas Morley’s handy reference guide of 1597:
And here’s Bravura’s range. The Longa is certainly narrower than the Breve, and the horizontal bars aren’t as thick. Obviously, our semibreves and shorter are not the same forms as in Morley’s day.
Here’s November2. Strangely, the Longa notehead is missing from the glyph set (or in the wrong place), so I’ve just added the Breve head.
(The slight misalignment of the stem is just a screen alias issue: zoom in and there’s no problem.)
And here’s MTF-Cadence. (I can only attach three files, it seems).
I prefer the thicker beams and the shorter vertical strokes. Bravura has shorter strokes, but lacks the thick lines; November has the thick lines but lacks the shorter strokes. Something for everyone!
Of course, the Longa and Maxima are part of the Mediaeval / Renaissance set of noteheads in SMuFL, so may be intended to match better with similar vintage notehead forms for the other notes.
Coming back to this old thread: November 2 received an update, which fixed the missing Longa notehead.
We also have Finale Maestro now:
And of course, for my money, the best breves in town, Sebastian:
Enjoyable thread, thanks!
EDIT. I made a suggestion in this post for changing the standard Dorico Longa notehead to a Breve notehead (with stem) that was misleading. I’m deleting most of this post. See further down this thread another post.
Chris
Why not change the next one (second from the right) instead?
Also: you’ve got word extensions on single notes.
Hi Ben! Good to hear from you.
I tried altering the notehead on the next one but ran into trouble with stems, in particular with notes above the middle line of the staff. If it works for you and you have a mo to jot down instructions I’d be very grateful. I’m new to the Notehead Sets Editor and have probably missed something obvious.
Word extensions, ha! It’s what the editor requested. They are only on the Longa notes that occur before what you might call the final bar (b.138), and I’m sympathetic to that.
Chris
You probably need to adjust the position where the stems connect to the notes.
Click on the + and then move the anchor to the correct position for stem Up and Stem Down.
That’s the way to go semantically, I’m sure, though complicated. However I might stick with my workaround for now, which seems to work well for me. Being simpler I can apply it retrospectively to previous projects without too much hassle.
Hmm. Actually, I note that my rectangular noteheads (in the Sebastian font) don’t have any stem positions, and work fine. (I guess because they are straight, it’s not an issue.)
Can you show the problem you have with stems?
My suggestion for changing the standard Dorico Longa notehead to the Breve notehead (with stem) was unnecessary and misleading, I’m sorry to say. I’m not sure what I did originally, but now I’ve tried it again simply editing the Longa notehead to have a Breve notehead does the job fine. I use the built-in Large Noteheads so have scaled the notehead up to 120 in both the X and Y directions as part of the edit.
Screenshot below.
Many thanks to Ben for sticking with me down whatever rabbit hole it was I went down! I think I thought that in changing the notehead to a wider one I would have to adjust the stem as well, not realising that the stem would change intelligently, and that the Stem tab in the Edit Notehead dialog is only for use in special situations. (Have I now got that right?)
I’ll go back and delete most of my original post.
Hi everybody,
I have a question in connection with the Longa notehead which is why I post it in this topic:
In the notehead design “Larger Noteheads” (ie. the Dorico standard; > Engraving Options > Notes > Noteheads > Notehead design), I want to change the design of the Longa notehead, so that it looks similar to the Breve notehead (as in the first music example here in this topic, posted by @k_b).
When I change the notehead in the Notehead Sets Editor (> Library > Notehead Sets… > Larger noteheads) by substituting the default notehead (mensuralNoteheadLongaWhite, U+E937) with the desired notehead (noteheadDoubleWholeSquareOversized, U+F4BB), the default notehead is overwritten not only (as desired) in the notehead set “Larger Noteheads”, but in all instances where this particular notehead appears (eg. in the notehead set “Default Noteheads”).
Now my question: Is there a way to change just the glyph used for one particular note value in one particular notehead set (without changing the design of this notehead in other notehead sets)?
Hi @Chris_Davey,
apparently, you also want to substitute the default Longa notehead with the Breve notehead and have posted this solution:
I think an easier way would be not to scale the normal-size notehead up to 120 %, but to use the original larger noteheads. They are to be found in the optional glyphs range of the SMuFL specification:
U+F4BA: noteheadDoubleWholeOversized
U+F4BB: noteheadDoubleWholeSquareOversized
U+F4BC: noteheadWholeOversized
U+F4BD: noteheadHalfOversized
U+F4BE: noteheadBlackOversized
See this topic on the Musescore website which I have found on the Dorico forum in this post.
These larger (“oversized”) noteheads are listed as “Recommended stylistic alternates” in the SMuFL specification (see https://w3c.github.io/smufl/latest/tables/noteheads.html#recommended-stylistic-alternates. However, I have not found a place on the SMuFL github where their above-mentioned Unicode position is specified.
1 Like