Custom Double Trills in Dorico

Is there any way to recreate a double trill with 2 auxiliary notes (with different noteheads) as shown here?:


The closest I’ve managed to get with Dorico is this unsightly mess:

And this is with considerable ‘hacking’ already: 2 voices with changes to the voice column index, dragging stems, creating 2 custom notehead sets… (far harder than it is to hack the same result in Sib, with which the first example is created).

I know it probably sounds a bit mental, but this is a game-changer for me; I use this technique all the time in my music; it’s commonly used by Saariaho and some others.
Screenshot 2020-11-13 at 19.56.26.png

Welcome to the forum, Jago. It took me a couple of minutes to do this:

using grace notes rather than “real” trill auxiliary notes. Take a look at the attached project.
trill-aux.dorico.zip (269 KB)

“This project was created with a later version of Dorico” … <e.g. Daniel’s got access to the nightly builds :slight_smile: >

That looks like an interesting technique Jago, hard to tell from Daniels playback being so short, do you have any fuller examples we can listen to?

What’s the idea, they’re trilling or quick strumming the note I guess, then pluck the inner notes?

@Daniel,
Wow, thanks for the really quick reply!

That’s really helpful - definitely works in this case. Have to say though it doesn’t in a case where there’s no note being tied to (e.g. second example below): however, it got me thinking enough to come up with the solution of writing the auxiliary trill notes as normal notes in a second voice, changing the notehead size and type to suit (actually this is basically the same workaround I use in Sib in the end…).


Bit of a faff, but it works.

@RedtideMusic

It’s a double harmonic trill on violin, so alternating between harmonics and open strings whilst playing 2 strings at the same time. You can hear it in real life at the start of this piece here: