Copying dynamics and articulations simultaneously

New to Dorico since some weeks, but 25 years of Finale, like many of us…

Articulations can obviously be copied with the paste special command, but dynamics require a proper filter setting and a normal paste.

Is there any way to copy and paste articulations and dynamics simultaneously?

Welcome to the forum!

I haven’t found a way to do this, but for dynamics I’ve found it quicker to select them directly, rather than select whole bars and then filter.

If you’re copying single dynamics, it’s also quick to select one of them and then Alt-click where you want it to go. (You can Alt-click most things, but not articulations, which are part of the note.) And of course you can select multiple objects and set a dynamic or articulation on them directly, instead of copy/paste.

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Thank you!

Okay, but selecting them directly obviously does not work for more than one dynamic marking at once, if I’m not missing anything. If I select multiple ones, the notes get selected as well. So invoking the filter seems inevitable to me.

I’d like to select ~20 measures from a group’s leading player (e.g. in a big band score, Alto Sax 1) and copy selectable items to other player (e.g.Alto Sax 2 and other saxes) to make sure they all get the same markings. I try to rarely touch a single item, always entering chords, distributing them and copy multiple items simultaneously.

As it is, it seems that Dorico is not as versatile and fast in that regard as Finale, where I had multiple sets of copy settings to choose from with hotkeys. So @dspreadbury , please count this as a feature request for versatile copy options:

  • it would be nice to be able to combine any objects for filtering, including articulations
  • it would be nice to have programmable sets of these filter settings

Thanks for considering!

You can combine filtering by using the ‚deselect‘ option, one by one.

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Thanks, of course. But positive lists are more future-proof in software development than negative lists, and in case of a notation program would reflect the contextual difference between primary and secondary notation much more appropriate (like in this text).

I concur.

A lot of this has to do with the details of how you’re selecting items, how long the passage is, and how far away from the notes the dynamics are positioned. But it’s perfectly possible to select multiple dynamics individually (click the first one, Ctrl-click the others):

click

Or using marquee selection (dragging with the mouse):

drag

In neither case did any notes get selected.

I do mass selections of multiple dynamics all day every day, so much so that I have mapped a key command to “Filter > All Dynamics.” You can also do immediate or gradual separately. I recommend having a look at these:

It makes it a lot faster so I can just select a bunch of staves and immediately deselect everything but dynamics.

In addition, with a large amount of things selected, you can invoke the jump bar with ‘J’ and type shorthand syntax, such as fd or fil dyn to filter dynamics. This method works with any kind of filtering, I personally find it much faster than right-clicking and searching through the menu.

To select everything but the actual music – you can also invert the filtering to deselect only, and set a key command or jump bar to filter all notes & chords. And you’ll probably want to filter rests (which is unfortunately is a separate action; I think it’s been requested to have a filter which is notes/chords/rests all in one which would be handy). Again all of this is easily accessible via the jump bar with abbreviated syntax.

Regarding your original ask to copy/paste them simultaneously, I don’t believe this is possible at this time.

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You can of course enter your dynamics for all instruments in one go. There’s no need to do a copy/paste.

Yeah, I’ve done the same thing. For me, the method I use differs depending on how many things I’m copying, how many places I’m copying them to, whether it’s vertical or horizontal, etc.