Correct steps to make a rhythmic cue?

I’m wanting to do this:

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And I want to make sure I’m doing it the most efficient way, since I have a ton of these to do in the next few weeks. I did read the manual on this topic.

Here’s what I’m doing:

  1. Add a second dummy instrument to a score layout
  2. Write in the rhythms in that new staff where they’ll be displayed. It seems I can’t add these as a slash voice, since then the notes won’t display at the top of the staff if I set it to rhythmic cue.
  3. Change regular noteheads to slash noteheads
  4. Add the cue to the displayed instrument
  5. Change the cue to rhythmic cue
  6. Toggle on the “Start text” property.

Could someone confirm I’m doing this the correct/fastest way? It certainly is easier than doing it in Finale, though I wish I could add these cues as slash voices initially. And it would be helpful if there were an option in Layout Options to never display the cue labels in a particular layout.

If you have to input the rhythms anyway, I wouldn’t go through the effort of a dummy instrument. You can just enter them in another voice. After input, change the noteheads (and size if necessary), hide ledger lines (if necessary), and suppress the playback. If there are a lot of them, wait until the end, filter by voice and make the other changes all in one go.

That doesn’t work if there are beams involved. Or at least it didn’t the last time I tried it (a year ago or so), and I don’t think anything had changed.

Edit: no, same as before.

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Ah, I see what you mean. Yikes! There’s no way around that other than cueing another staff?

Seems that way. It doesn’t feel like a workaround, really. That’s the whole point of rhythmic cues, and I guess the idea is that the rhythms should be present on a staff somewhere.

It’s already worlds easier than Finale (and looks better). Just wondering if there are little tweaks that could make it a bit faster.

Update: well, one obvious improvement I didn’t think about before. Add the rhythmic hits for the entire flow as one gigantic cue.

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(For anyone following, @dan_kreider also posted in the Facebook group which might be of interest. Dan - if you’re cross-posting, do try to remember to make that clear to people!)

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Thanks. I saw these as two separate questions. But I can see the value of posting this link to the Facebook thread.

I’m back. I don’t know why this is failing, but it is.

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It’s because Dorico won’t allow the beams of one up-stem voice to go “inside” the notes in another up-stem voice. You’ll need to adjust that in Engrave mode.

This is a rhythmic cue, which I had thought avoided this limitation. Apparently not!

No, rhythmic cues still use voices with stem directions, so they’ll still be subject to the same rules for where beams are allowed to be placed.

There must be a better way than this, but I did think of a convoluted workaround if you’re on a deadline.

Enter the D and E in a stems-down voice. In Engrave move the beam to the correct position stems-up. If there’s a way to simply move the stems to the other side of the notehead, then you’re done, but I couldn’t find any setting for that, and I’m assuming if there was you would have already found it. Duplicate your Default or Larger Notehead set and call it something like Reverse Stem Noteheads. Do the notehead set thing of New from Selection for the quarter, then remove the previous quarter. In your new quarter start by swapping the Stem Down NW and Stem Up SE settings. You’ll need to tweak these further to account for the stem width I think, but that’s a start. Apply the new Reverse Stem Notehead Set to the notes.

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Just realized that looks wrong and D-E should be Hang-Straddle. Anyway, drag the beam up to the correct spot!