Depending on what exactly you want, you may be able to scale these in Notehead Sets and save them as a default.
+1, a way to auto-select Flat over a certain length could be nice. Also, I’d really like flat slurs that are actually flat. Dorico’s are a weird combination of 2 curved slurs put together or something. In any case the center of a Dorico “flat slur” is actually thinner than the shoulders which makes them look really odd to me and different than virtually all published music.
Not my personal style, but I have a client who always asks for this too, so this would be a nice option to have.
This is easy to do already. Once you hit the Save as Default star in Paragraph Styles, that style will be available to select in Preferences/Key Commands. (I use Shift+E for this myself)
You can do this in Music Symbols/Dynamics/Niente (for hairpins). I agree the default is too small.
If you mean to show this on the score (as opposed to making it a Play option), I am not sure why one would not just notate the hold using regular notes; I thought the fermata pretty much left the length somewhat optional to performer/conductor interpretation.
This has been discussed before and it is a wonderful idea. It would be a boon for many of us.
If implemented, in addition to any layout options, I’d like to see the following three options, assignable on a case-by-case basis:
A footnote feature is one of those things that, once available, would change how I go about expressing the music. I find that with the lines feature, I use that quite often to indicate things more clearly than I did in the past. For example, in jazz charts, a string of 8th notes with marcato accents conventionally indicates that those notes are played straight (not swung), but not necessarily accented as heavily as a jazz marcato would indicate in isolation. This is often confusing and subject to different interpretations.
To avoid confusion, some arrangers explicitly write “Straight 8ths”, but then it may be ambiguous how long the player is to play straight. With the lines feature, it is very easy to give a straight 8th marking and bracket the notes explicitly, leaving no confusion. I think it is fundamentally better than the older conventions.
I can see footnotes being equally useful, changing the way we might approach parts in some cases. In addition to
Bottom of page
End of flow
End of layout
It should also include “Below current system” and “Below current staff”, particularly in parts. If we are giving performance instructions in the part, it may be better for the commentary to be immediately under the notes in question, rather than requiring the player to look to the bottom of the page. I realize I can accomplish that with regular text, however, I’d like to think a Footnotes feature might include the possibility of having a single comment with the option of specifying on which scores and parts the commentary should appear.
(And an option for above, for that matter.)
Imagine what Percy Grainger would have done if he had this feature.
In live-performances, a fermata can have a completely different feeling from a number of rests (or a held note) with the same duration (where the tempo continues). Yes the duration is normally quite free, but already between e.g. approx. 3sec, 6sec or 9sec, there is a very different effect, and for unknown music, this information might not be obvious.
On the different types (seconds vs beats vs custom): while „switching“ from feeling a tempo to counting seconds has the effect of lifting you more out of the previous situation, giving the time in beats can call for the conductor more to stay in the feeling of the tempo. In music theater scores you might use custom text of course to say e.g. „continue after X has left stage“, which can be difficult to manually align, maybe make the fermata bar wider, etc.
Of course it would be a great amalgamation if the beat/time duration would be understood by playback.
I’m afraid I didn’t find the place to place this – there’s nothing on my Mac named “DefaultLibraryAdditions”. Can anybody help me get this thing to work on my Mac?
It looks like that lives at ~/Users/[username]/LibraryApplication Support/Steinberg/Dorico #/DefaultLibraryAdditions on a Mac. If DefaultLibraryAdditions doesn’t already exist there, try creating it, then add the doricolib file in that location.
That’s the right place – thank you!
But: This puts a slash in front of every addition (as in Cm/add9, where it is obviously wrong). On the other hand I still cannot have a chord symbol with two slashes (like Gm7/9/11).
How can I remove it again? Taking the file out of the folder and restart Dorico 4 doesn’t work.
All that file did was redefine the opening parenthesis to be a slash and the closing one to be nothing. I’ve never seen your chord nomenclature before, so thought it might save you some time, but if you need normal parentheses and multiple slashes then it won’t work and you’ll have to create all the chords manually in Project Default Appearances. Just delete the file. If you just started a New file with that active then perhaps those settings were embedded in it, but once deleted it shouldn’t affect anything else, or any other New files.
It may be possible to get what you want with a doricolib file rather than manually creating all suffixes for all roots, but you’d likely have to be pretty experienced with editing them to have a shot at it.
Yes, I understood that before. And by trying it out I realized that it wouldn’t solve my problem, because when you use parenthesis you write Cm(add9), and it makes no sense to replace that with Cm/add9. Also if you use parenthesis you write Cm7(9,11) or Cm7(9 11), but that ends up in Cm7/9,11 or Cm7/9 11 – and both are not useful, because a divider like a slash should divide all additions from each other, but not an addition from the root.
Thank you again for trying to help me out! I’m still looking forward to a real re-work of the chord symbol section …
Yeah, I’d love to have a way to create a custom suffix, or modify an existing one, and have it apply to all roots, instead of spending hours creating suffixes for each root. I’ve figured a few tricks such as accidental placement, dim symbol placement, etc, that can be done globally with a doricolib file, but there’s still a lot that I’d like to be able to globally edit too.
I imagine that feature, if implemented flexibly, could solve my desire for adding sections of dialogue when e.g. scoring an operetta. (I would probably put them between flows, but occasionally the “top/bottom of system” would be useful for smaller snippets).
one that came to me after seeing a post on the Facebook group:
It would be nice if one could make lines that simply attach from notehead to notehead.
Meaning that you don’t put in a horizontal line, then need to go into engraver mode to make it diagonal.
It would also be nice to define the end-points and attachment points of lines so that they don’t appear either too short or too long, but always the exact right distance from a note/accidental.
Jesper is right. And before lines were implemented, you could already use the gliss tool without text… So it’s been possible natively for quite some years!
Thank-you for that.
I tried it out and it works beautifully.
And I feel incredibly stupid not having realized this worked that way. It would have saved me SO much time!!!
I will amend what I had originally written then!
An extra option would be nice:
Being able to define, project-wide, or program-wide, where exactly end-points of lines (and glissandi) end up.
For example, I wouldn’t want a line to end touching a staff line. It creates a certain visual confusion, so a bit of white space would be nice.
However, this will vary depending on whether the diagonal line is coming from above or from below.
Obviously, from above I would want it ending a bit higher than the target note, and not exactly parallel to the notehead.
And coming from below it would need to end slightly below the target notehead.
This would also apply to the starting notehead, where the diagonal line would begin higher if going up, and lower if going down.
I would love it if, when inputting onto both staves of a choir reduction instrument simultaneously, four voice textures would ignore the default split point and always assign 2+2 top down.
