To input slurs for notes on one staff, we can either select all the notes to be slurred and hit ‘s’ or select just the first and last notes then hit ‘s’. I almost always select all the notes, either because I click the beams of eighths or sixteenths, or (more often) because I’m selecting using the keyboard exclusively, using shift+arrow keys, which selects everything between first and last.
So when I was trying to input slurs across staves recently, I selected all the notes to be slurred, as I always do, hit ‘s’, and got a slur only on the notes in the first staff. It didn’t take too much digging in the manual and forums to find out cross-staff slurs only work if you select the first and last notes, but nothing in between. Which is not so hard to do, so no big deal.
But is there a rationale for this? Especially considering Dorico’s keyboard-centric design, selecting all the notes seems like the logical way to do this. It was frustrating for a bit there, and it’s always nicer not to have to dig in the manual to do something you thought you already knew how to do. I imagine other newer users may get hung up and frustrated the same way I was.
Also, while I was figuring this out, I came across this thread, and I wondered if the issue of cross-staff slurs that begin and end in the same staff might be easier to communicate to the software by selecting all the notes to be slurred together. If you select only the start and finish, Dorico has no way of knowing you want the slur to include some notes on an adjacent staff, whereas maybe in a future version, selecting all the notes could prompt Dorico to create the proper slur over both staves? Just an idea.