Perhaps there is a more ideal way to notate this, but this seems like it should be the clearest way to me.
I’m in 3/4, What I’m looking to do is have 6 8th notes play evenly spaced over 4 beats. Dorico wants to simplify this into triplets (which isn’t incorrect), but I think it would be easier if they just looked like 8th with a bracket over them with “3:4” instead. Because the “feel” of the rhythm is like if you were in 4/4 at a different tempo.
For what it’s worth I think it would be a lot easier for a player to read it this way:
As a bonus, if you tell Dorico to input quarter-note triplets (hit 6 for quarter note, then semicolon to invoke the triplet popover, then 3) Dorico will automatically write it as shown above.
That’s exactly what I was imagining! However, I’m still unclear how you got to that - Dorico keeps splitting the tuples into 2 parts, how did you get the bracket to span all 6 notes? Even with the number tuplet enabled, I’m getting
(Top is original being updated in the property panel, bottom is attempting to re-input from scratch, which for some reason maintained the bracket while the after-the-fact update did not). But neither is doing it under a single bracket!
Yeah, the fact that Dorico is so insistent on notating it as you have it, and I’m fighting it does seem to indicate that my inclination is wrong. It’s possible that I’m being led astray because of how I got to this point - this is a transcription of a person singing who’s timing (and pitch, though that’s not relevant here) is very loose, and this passage in particular really sounds like they’re singing in 4/4. To me, that’s largely because the stresses are on alternating notes, so I wanted to notate it in a way that would come off as duple meter notation rather than triplet notation, and the triplet approach is more likely to result in stresses on 1 and 4 instead of 1, 3, and 5. But for the sake of legibility, you might be right to notate this this way anyways.
Ok, I think maybe you both win. Inputting it fresh with the 3:4q worked exactly as I wanted, even fixing the beaming to connect them all into one group (which was a separate desire I hadn’t mentioned). And…now that I’ve got it looking exactly as I envisioned, yeah, it’s very floaty looking. Sigh.
OK, triplets it is! Apologies for running you in circles as I experimented with this! At least I know a bit more about punching in tuplets for the future, I dunno how I would have found out about adding the “q” part to the pop up to get this to come out this way otherwise!
When entering tuplets in the popover, if you only enter numbers, they relate to the current selected note length. But you can force them to another by saying “the base of this tuplet is a q(uarter) or an e(ighth) or a h(alf) … and more obscurely x,y, or z)”
This is amazing to know. I’d intuitively figured the numbers related to my selected note value, but I hadn’t seen/read/learned about overriding that with the letters. Very useful, thank you!
