Converting existing auto dynamics into override dynamics in Play mode

Dorico
1

I’m new to Dorico and just updated to 4.1.

I imported a piano piece I originally created in Sibelius. It is a piano reduction of a string quartet. In order to get proper dynamics in Sibelius, I wrote it as two individual one-staff piano parts and visually combined these two to look like a grand staff.

I was able to reproduce this in Dorica, so that’s good.

In Sibelius, I used another trick to make the playback sound reasonable: I added some very detailed dynamics, but hid most of them from the user. Good performers don’t need to be micro-managed; computers do.

Dorico doesn’t support the concept of hiding things, which is fine, except that if I delete the dynamics, it affects the performance.

So I entered the new Play mode editor. It shows me what the programs is using for dynamics—green for what it decides based on the notation and blue for whatever I override this with.

What I would like to do is to turn all the green dynamics to blue. I then want to delete most (not all) of the dynamics in the score. This would allow me to keep the current performance, but de-clutter the printed music.

Is there any way to do this? I tried a lot of methods—none were great. The best I came up with was to manually trace over the existing performance from back to front (going from front to back would erase some information before I could trace it).

2

There is indeed no way at present to convert printed dynamics in the music into non-printing dynamics in the dynamics editor. You can engineer to sort of hide dynamics via Properties: you can hide the intensity marking for an immediate dynamic, and you can change a gradual dynamic to be text-based and then override the text marking to an empty string. I’m not sure this is less work overall than reproducing the effect of the dynamics in the dynamics editor, however.

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