Checked the manual (Dorico 2) and couldn’t find that this is possible in PLAY mode…
In PLAY mode I’ve made some tweaks to dynamics (velocity) beyond the scope of the hairpin markings in WRITE mode.
I want to copy/paste this change so that it’s duplicated in the other instruments (rather than having to re-map it for each).
Is this possible in the current version?
Thanks
You cannot currently cut and paste velocity data. You can cut and paste CC data between tracks, however.
Depending on how inconvenient it might be, you can copy the notes (which includes their edited velocities, of course) from one instrument to the other, then use Lock Durations to reinput the pitches of the notes in the destination; this will retain their edited velocities.
Thanks, Daniel. I’ll try that.
Following on from this, I have a related question. I’m using Dorico 3.5.
I’ve adjusted some velocities in a flute part, to improve the “shape” of the phrase on playback. I want the same adjustments in a violin part playing the same tune.
As per Daniel’s suggestion above, I’ve copied & pasted the notes from the flute stave to the violin stave.
This has partly worked and partly not!
On each of the notes where I had tweaked the velocity (visible as a darker colour “pillar”), the velocity data has copied across.
On each of the notes where I had left the velocity as it was, the violin part has defaulted to a velocity of 100.
I’m not sure why the flute’s default velocity wasn’t 100, but it wasn’t. So now they don’t match.
I realise that I could work around this by explicitly setting all the velocities in the flute part before copying it, but first I’d like to understand what’s going on.
Is this expected behaviour?
Also… is there a way to “shape” the phrase (aside from emphasising the first beat of the bar, which I know is a playback setting) which will then be additive to the dynamic which is set on the page as f, p, mf and so on? Or does this velocity-setting always have to be the final bit of tweaking, after any dynamics set in words?
Ideally I’d like to be able to shape the phrase first, then have it f, p and so on with the shape maintained, but I think what’s happening at the moment is that the f or p affects only the notes which are still on the default velocity setting, leaving the rest at their explicitly-set level - correct me if I’m wrong.
Thanks for any advice!
There’s a lot more we plan to do to make this kind of editing easier in future versions of Dorico. (Dorico 4 will not immediately solve this, unfortunately, though there has been a lot of important foundational technical work done this year that will make it easier for us to improve the editing experience in Play mode in subsequent releases, hopefully relatively soon after Dorico 4.0’s release.)
For the time being, this is all working as I would expect, however unsatisfactory it may be! The kind of data you can use to change dynamics in a way that is independent of the actual velocity level of individual notes is using the dedicated Dynamics editor in Play mode, but the problem with this is that you can’t easily copy the data from one instrument to another in a simple way, which is a major impediment to efficient workflow and which we do plan to address.
I’m sorry that this is all a lot more awkward than it would be in a dedicated tool like Cubase at the moment!
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OK makes sense, I look forward to future improvements in the fullness of time 
So to confirm, is the best workflow at present what I already got to? i.e.
- Write the phrase in one part
- Set the f/p/mf-type dynamic to get an overall level
- Shape the phrase, inc tweaking each note at least a tiny bit so it’s explicitly set
- Copy & paste the phrase to other parts, which will bring with it the velocities
and if a different f/p-type dynamic is wanted for the phrase at a different point in the piece, change the velocities again explicitly after pasting.
Also, one thing which I’m still puzzled about: the flute part somehow had some shaping already even before I set it, yet the violin did not. (E.g. where there were a series of quavers, the on-beat quavers were set slightly higher than the off-beat quavers.) What would explain that? Could it be related to how hard I hit the notes when I played them in? Is there another setting somewhere to do with things like that, which I haven’t learnt yet?
If you recorded the music in real-time, then the velocities that you played will be the ones that are preserved; otherwise, Dorico will perform a certain amount of humanisation according to the settings on the Dynamics page of Playback Options.