In this excerpt these are ‘fake’ grace notes, which I have made so they can playback at a reasonable speed (q=300) instead of flashing past in an instant (I simply can’t figure out how to slow down a section of graces like this). The composer wants them much closer together so as to ‘look like grace notes’. The picture here shows the maximum I can squeeze them together with a note spacing change section.
What else can I try?
What happens if you put a note spacing change at the start of the 10/16 bar to increase the note spacing there? Or put more music on the system?
Or use real grace notes, make them the unslashed type, and use a combination of Playback Options > Timing > Grace Notes to change the playback speed of all grace notes in the project, or add a tempo change at the start of this phrase to something really slow to create the right result in playback and hide the tempo change?
As said, I have not been able to get it to work with grace notes, as they flash past almost instantly no matter what I set the grace note duration to. Whether it’s me or Dorico or NotePerformer I am unable to say. But this is why I have to use proper notes not graces, which is of course a bad hack. I can control the speed and hide the metro mark no problem. So for the moment the compression problem remains.
So, I do not want to change the grace note speed for the whole project. Attached is a minimal working example that shows the graces zipping past, with NP, at least. I tried to follow what you said but I am missing something.
grace note speed.dorico (545.5 KB)
Also, after the grace note speed change the normal note speed seems messed up.
No I think you’re right, I hadn’t tested that before posting and it doesn’t appear to work as I imagined. Apologies!
I know you’re trying to get as far as possible with automatic means, but sometimes manual intervention is just unavoidable. Your desired result is easily achievable:
Thanks @Romanos but its the first example that is in my project, and there are dozens of sections like that. Hard work to manually space. The minimal example was just for @Lillie_Harris to check.
Just so we are clear: are you claiming that adjusting the note spacing manually as I’ve detailed above doesn’t work? Or you just don’t want to do that? (I certainly understand wanting to avoid as much manual intervention as possible, but sometimes we don’t have any other choice, unfortunately.)
@Romanos sure it works. I am just hoping there is a more efficient way. And it’s not clear to me why Dorico Note Spacing Change wont let me squish them up as tight as we want.
Ignoring the playback issue and getting back to the spacing:
If your notes are “fake” grace notes – then presumably they are real notes that you’ve scaled down? In which case, apply a large note spacing value to the 2nd bar, so that it takes up more space. (… which is what Leo said.!)
To further what @benwiggy (and I, I guess) said, the note spacing setting is fighting horizontal justification. Assuming the system is a fixed length, if you remove horizontal space from one end of the system you need to put it somewhere else on the same system, or put it somewhere else on the system and fill it with stuff.
A grace note differs from a normal note in several important ways. A grace note does not have any rhythmic duration, so the time it needs to be heard in playback has to be borrowed from the normal notation which surrounds it. In the example Dorico project @Andro provided earlier in this topic, the tempo is initially q=50, changes to e=20 when the grace notes begin, and changes back to q=50 immediately after them. Because the grace notes have no rhythmic duration, the two tempo changes occur at the same rhythmic position, so the change to e=20 is ignored.
What @Andro seems to want are notes that look like grace notes and squeeze together like grace notes, but don’t borrow time to be heard in playback. Sorry, but grace notes can’t do all of those things.
@johnkprice thanks, but in performance, while it is true that grace notes occupy no musical time in the bar from a theory point of view, they do occupy performance time, and long runs as found in Chopin and the music I am setting do not steal time from the following note. So they can bend the tempo etc.
This is why in my OP I mentioned they are ‘fake grace notes’ to overcome this problem with Dorico graces.
Chopin and I share the same troubles:
[Nicely fit together incidentally.]
Maybe these are not called grace notes but I don’t know what else they are called.
This looks like a prime candidate for a tuplet scaled down to grace note size with the tuplet number and bracket hidden to me.
