I bought Dorico 3 Elements as I’m not a professional and only play/compose music as a hobby.
I am creating my first score and I have 6 8th notes in my bar. By default, Dorico groups all these notes together but I want to group them 2 by 2.
The documentation even states that when using 3/4 it will group by quarter notes by default however when I’m using 3/4, it groups the entire bar together instead of grouping by quarter note. Here’s the documentation explaining it: https://steinberg.help/dorico_elements/v3/en/dorico/topics/notation_reference/notation_reference_beaming_according_to_time_signature_c.html
It also says that you can set a custom time signature to specify how to group beams so because my time signature is in 3/4 and I want to group every quarter note, I should be able to use [1+1+1]/4 but that also doesn’t seem to work…
Is this a bug or am I missing something obvious?
Hi Yannick82!
Is your project built from scratch in Dorico or is it an xml import? In the latter case, select all, Edit> Beams>Reset beaming
It’s from scratch. No importing
I’m afraid the documentation is mistaken in this regard: a bar of 3/4 consisting only of eighth notes will have a single beam group. Because you can’t edit Notation Options in Dorico Elements you can’t change this default behaviour easily, and because [1+1+1]/4 is actually the same as 3/4, it doesn’t change this. It would be a total bore to split every beam group by hand, I’m sure. If you wanted to attach your project here, I would happily change the beam grouping option for you in Notation Options using Dorico Pro and then re-attach it for you.
Ok so it isn’t possible… That’s a pitty. Initially I thought it was a limitation of elements but when seeing the documentation, I got my hopes up…
Anyway, I’ll do it manually. Don’t worry about it. There’s also a lot of copy/pasting. The score has a total of 32 bars so not that big and with some copy/pasting it’s alright I guess…
Yes, if you have a lot of consistent rhythms, copy and paste a bar or two with the beaming fixed up, then use Lock Durations to repitch the notes without having to rewrite all the rhythms.
My apologies for the mistake there in the manual - I was using 3/4 vs 6/8 as an example of how different metres and beam groups can be implied by different time signatures, even if both have the same total number of beats, but I can see now how that sentence can be interpreted to be about Dorico’s defaults. I’ll be correcting this to make it clearer, thanks for bringing it to my attention.