Dorico becomes better and better. Thank you very much, Dorico team, for the excellent additions in version 3.5! The figured bass feature is just magic. That’s what I love so much about this program: When a feature is ready for release, wow! I have no words for it.
In the past I have ranted about two little things: The first is the Dvořák humoresque problem with the beaming pattern. This is solved now. Thank you!
The second is when you try to write the Goldberg variations or Mozart piano sonata B major KV 570 second movement. Clef changes and double repeat barlines. I know the very short passage in Elaine Gould’s book showing just one exemple with a clef, a key and a measure change – sandwiched between the barlines.
For key and measure changes this makes sense to me (there are different opinions), but a clef is a different thing because it does not change the music at all. Only it’s position on the stave. In an earlier post I have given examples.
My question is: I still see no options to change this behaviour. Have I overlooked something? My workaround is to place the clef to the second note and move it in engrave mode. Then adjust the first note. This destroys the playback, but that’s not the problem for me.
As I have just heard in one of the videos, there are “as many notation conventions as there are stars in the sky”. I think: If it’s intended that the houses like Bärenreiter, Henle, Peters, Breitkopf etc. one day switch to Dorico, there should be options for the clef placement to the right or to the left of a double repeat barline.
I say this because the program in it’s basics is so much near perfect, but this little detail is still missing.
I am not as enthusiastic about this update. I am very much a dorico user (a contemporary music composer) and have found the ability to write continuously without being a slave to the measure attractive and there are many other things. but I miss the ability of score ( and even sibelius and graphire music press to an extent) to place any length of staff anywhere on the page and box or circle any music or text on the page (I guess the staff cutout is done differently in sibelius, which is a slave to the measure). The new possibility to choose duration first or second to the pitch is interesting. I played with it a bit and it will take a bit of practice to be fluid at it. Condense scores was a good new update (in 3.0?) but I would easily trade it for cutout staves or boxed music and text (cutout score can be done to an extent in dorico by overlaying a white graphic (didn’t finale initially use this method?). Not a replacement for the way sibelius handles this problem). Things are just not that useful to me, yet.
I realize that you can’t please everyone and that this is a business that is playing to what they think is their strongest market, and I am sure that it is. I am here for the duration and wait for updates with anticipation like everyone else; but from my soapbox there has been mostly disappointment with an occasional “now you are talking.”
Music notation is so a vaste field, and everyone has different requests. Cutout scores are often requested, and I guess that one day this will come. Ferneyhough measures and rhythms have been possible since version 1, but generally my impression is that first comes everything related to traditional notation which is difficult enough to bring to perfection. The condensing feature is fantastic, I have never seen such a thing before. And version 3.5 is great for everyone interested in baroque music because of the figured bass.
I think that your requests are absolutely in line of what the program is made for, and I’m hopeful that they will be implementated sooner or later. But the clef placement (unfortunately) between double repeat barlines… For me this belongs to the very basics, and I find it a bit strange that there nothing has happened yet.
Thanks for the feedback on the issue of clef placement relative to double barlines, hbalmer. We will try to tackle this as part of a more thoroughgoing review of the notational impact of repeats, and on how items like clefs, key signatures, time signatures, slurs, ties, lyrics, etc. interact with them, which is a big job, but one that we certainly intend to address in due course.
That’s very good to hear. Thank you, Daniel. I see a lot of big jobs in this program making things as easy as possible for us…
I take this post to say how wonderful the new update is.
the new feature “pitch before duration” has doubled my workflow! And the other new entry are very fantastic!
Thank you team!