I am noticing an inconsistency in how unisons are handled in condensed staves. In this screen shot the unison Clarinets start out marked ‘a2,’ but then switch to suddenly to up and down stem unisons.
The two Clarinet lines were input in the same way, so there shouldn’t be any difference between them when they’re in unison.
Further, here is a passage of unison rhythm chords in the horns where on the left-hand page the dyads are stemmed together but on the right-hand they have up and down stems.
Is there a way I can control that?
I’d also be curious to know how Dorico makes its decision to not condense sometimes. In the example immediately above, on the left page, Trumpets 1 & 2 have separate staves even though there is no part crossing, but are condensed on the right page. Note that below in the Trombones, all three are condensed on a single stave, even though the texture of their music is not at all different from the Trumpets.
Put a condensing change bar 56 and it should be ok. Dorico stops a phrase when there are rests. Clqrinets cannot be a 2 at 56, but they could before. Help Dorico with this condensing change (even without touching anything). This will tell Dorico that a new phrase begins.
Marc’s beaten me again, but I’ll try to explain in slightly more detail. The way you entered the material is irrelevant; it’s the context that matters. Largely speaking Dorico can only make one decision about stem directions per phrase, where a phrase is defined as the stuff between pairs of rests.
For instance, between the fourth bar of your first screenshot and the end of the screenshot, there are no rests in the clarinets. The last few bars have to be on separate stems, which means that the previous material (unbroken by rests) also has to be on separate stems. One way of forcing Dorico to consider material as a new phrase is to insert a Condensing Change that has nothing ticked apart from the relevant players in the left side of the dialog. If you insert one for the clarinets at the start of bar 56 then Dorico will consider that a new phrase, and it’ll be able to make a different decision either side of that barline.
For the horns at trumpets, I can only assume that there’s something further on on the right page that’s influencing Dorico’s decision. It could also be that the dynamics only exist on horns 2 and 4, not horns 1 and 3, for instance, but without seeing the project it’s impossible to know.
Thank you. That seems to have done the trick.
I do wish that one could edit items on condensed staves in Page View. Toggle back and forth between Galley and Page to make simple corrections is tedious, and now that the score has condensing in it, the program runs noticeably slower.
And another problem has come up – here is a screen shot in Galley view that shows at bars 69-70 that the diminuendo to p in the upper winds is the same.
Horns 1 & 3 and Horns 2 & 4 are playing exactly the same things, but the former have up/down stems and the latter are ‘a2’. I assume that the split in parts that Horns 1 & 3 have at the start of the right-hand page is the cause. I tried to insert the Condensing Change there, but nothing happened except the down slur in the fourth bar disappeared. I guess I’m not understanding the principle behind this technique.
Select the clarinet 1 hairpin in Galley View? What does the attachment line tell you? I suspect it’s attached to the wrong place, and is only showing correctly in Galley View because it’s truncated by the p.
As to the horns, what happens in horns 1 and 3 before bar 296? The context matters in both directions, so you may need a condensing change at the start of the right hand page but another condensing change at or before 296.
I suspect if you put a condensing change for the horns at the start of 300, that’ll fix the previous few bars. It might be impossible to do anything about 300-303 without resorting to Manual Condensing (at the bottom of the Condensing Change dialog); semibreves/whole notes are problematic in that they don’t have stems, so Dorico errs on the side of caution by splitting the stems that surround semibreves/whole notes.
Thank you, pianoleo, for this. What you suggested worked, but I don’t understand why, and I need to. I’ve got a lot of editing work in this score ahead of me and I can’t keep importuning you.
For starters, I don’t understand why a Condensing Change fixes a problem in the bars preceding where it is placed. Isn’t this counter-intuitive?
So how do I come to learn about the criteria that determine the point at which this Condensing Change needs to be inserted?
One of my problems with Dorico is that it makes me feel stupid. I worked with Score for 25 years and while I didn’t master all of it, I was always comfortable with it from the get-go. Dorico is something else – a very unforgiving program – CTRL-Z is my best friend.
I know that you are responding to my questions out of the goodness of your heart, and I thank you for your help.
If you have a 16-bar passage with no rests, Dorico sees the entire 16 bars as a single phrase. It has to make one condensing decision that covers the whole 16 bars. Condensing Changes act as a manual Phrase Break. If you add a Condensing Change at the downbeat of bar 9, bar 9-16’s condensing approach no longer depends on bar 1-8’s content and bar 1-8’s condensing approach no longer depends on bar 9-16’s content.
