A little request: at the moment, you can only apply the ‘dampen’ symbol to a note. But more often than not, it is connected to a rest. Could that be possible in the future? I’m loath to add it in as text (shift-X). Also, I think it might be an idea to create a unique playing techniques category exclusively for the harp. It is its own beast with unique symbols and techniques different from other strings or percussion. My apologies if this has been covered elsewhere (I didn’t find it).
Once we have the proper editing shortcuts working in Write mode it should be possible to nudge any playing technique to any rhythmic position with Alt+left/right. This won’t do anything at all for playing techniques at the moment, but the plan is that it will, relatively soon.
Sounds like a wonderful plan, thanks Daniel!
I’ve been using the ‘harmon mute’ symbol, which looks like a small harp dampen symbol, which I believe is the well known shape from publishing, the ‘crop mark’ , which is a circle with a larger ‘plus sign’ situated right over the centre of the circle. However, in this new world of proofreading in Dorico 6, my multiple insertions of harmon mute to my harp part are showing up as a ‘Surely you can’t be serious’* type of error, since a harmon mute is of course, for a brass instrument.
I think the answer here is to create a graphic custom playing technique. Is there a tutorial on how to do this? It should be relatively straightforward, but I’m not sure whether the type of symbol I’m to be creating here is a text glyph, a couple of pieces of text with some unusual placement (i.e. a letter o and plus sign on top of one another) or something else entirely.
Needless to say, I’d also want to have Noteperformer, my playback engine, to recognize it and cut off the note (Would this be a key switch or perhaps a command that one can pass from Noteperformer via the playback template?), but I realize that this is another issue entirely (and certainly not an answer that Dorico can necessarily provide as it’s a 3rd party).
* I know that proofreading doesn’t (yet) have a ‘surely you can’t be serious’ category per se, but I guess it could/might in the future, especially if AI is involved…
It’s tricky to directly replace one playing technique with another (though it would be great to have that kind of “find and replace” functionality in Dorico – maybe one day!). However, the one I think you should be using is found in the Unpitched Percussion category, and is the one you get when you type damp into the Shift+P popover.
Thanks for the tip, Daniel. It’s nice to have the actual technique, although Proofreading now complains that ‘Damp technique intended to be used on unpitched percussion instruments.’ (and it also requires it to be attached to the beginning of a note, which is not what I or any harpist want either).
It seems odd that while there is a large amount of material in Dorico Help on harp pedals, there is nothing regarding this fairly important notation element for the harp.
The problem with the “Damp” technique and proofreading is one we’re aware of - it should be fixed in a forthcoming maintenance update.
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