Hi, would it be possible to implement a feature to allow to copying rhythm from a staff to another? I read on another post that you can copy a phrase and then repitch. That works on a small scale, but it’s not really practical when orchestrating from a midi sketch with many staves.
Thanks,
Lorenzo
I strongly agree with this. Years ago I went to a lot of trouble to write a plugin for Sibelius that superimposes the rhythm from the clipboard on a selected passage. I’ve found that being able to change the rhythm and pitch parameters of a passage independently is incredibly useful and would love to see it fully implemented in Dorico.
Sorry if this sounds dumb but if you were pasting a rhythm then what pitches would you want Dorico to use? E.G. if the source phrase has 4 crotchets but the destination phrase has a tuplet, what should Dorico do? Or do you just mean you want the phrase pasted as a single pitch?
I think I just don’t know the situation you are in. Would you be able to explain a little further of your scenario?
I think they want to replicate one of the Finale plugins which would map a rhythmic pattern onto existing notes.
There might be another way, depending on what you are trying to do. If you want to wrote whole notes and turn them into a repeated pattern you could activate the caret in the top stave and use shift-down arrow to expand the caret downwards across all staves, then use the right arrow to move the caret and then “U” to separate the notes where you want to split it into two notes.
It’s not exactly the same thing as a rhythm copy, but it can work for some similar types of situations where you want to start with a chord in whole notes and turn it into a series of repeated notes following a certain rhythm.
The idea is to copy the source rhythm to a destination bar(s) that have the same number of note entries. For instance, if you have a 4/4 bar written as “two half notes”, and another one as “quarter-rest-quarter-rest”, you could copy the rhythm of one into the other, without having to worry about pitch. As Janus pointed out, Finale has a plugin that does that -it’s quite handy for orchestrators.
Yes, that is a useful tool -thanks. It could work in lieu of a rhythm copy feature in some scenarios, but there’s a variety of situations where having the ability to match rhythms across staves (or across measures of the same staff) would be faster and less “destructive” alternative.
A way of handling this specific situation in Dorico is you can select the two half notes and Shift-Alt-LeftArrow (don’t know what the MacOS equivalent is) to shorten them incrementally by the rhythmic grid subdivision - by default that will be eighths so you would press it twice to turn the two half notes into two quarters with rests after. To turn the two quarters with rests after into two half notes, selecting them and Shift-Alt-RightArrow a couple times will expand them. This operation could be done very quickly, so in this particular simple case, a rhythm copy tool probably wouldn’t save you any time even if it were available.
There are of course other more complicated cases where this wouldn’t help you and you would need a rhythm copy tool.
I’m not saying that these take the place of a rhythm copy tool at all, and I think the Dorico team has already said they were looking at the best way to implement such a tool - just trying to highlight a few other potential time saving features that may not make up completely for the lack of rhythm copy, but could still help.
Have a look at the relevant vidoes here. They explain what the plugin did in Sibelius.
I was a little skeptical at first, but it look very useful, sold!
