Eurgh. The only other approach (apart from specifying lots of different accidentals) is to use a VST that supports Scala files and import your scale in.
yes I guess soā¦or using contact and the mapping editor, but for this you need good wav samplesā¦lots of work.
Anyway. Thanx a lot for your help - I much appreciate that.
and you know what Iām just doing when reading this? specifying lots of different accidentals 
ā¦thatās what I figured out, tooā¦
Just because you want 19 notes, that doesnāt mean you āhave toā divide an octave into 19 equal steps for Dorico playback. You can divide it into any number of steps you want, and choose how to notate 19 of them. If you want to notate the others, just create more accidentals.
31 EDO is a pretty good choice for quarter comma meantone.
a none-dorico question:
I wonder: which musician can play in 31 EDO?
I think the one in question must have perfect pitch and even then he might have to practice months before getting the right position on the string of a violin or cello or what so ever, no?
I write music which often has over 600 individual pitches within an octave. Itās quite easily playable or singable because the intervallic relationships are actually simple. 31EDO approximates some of these simple relationships nicely, so is certainly playable.
You donāt need perfect pitch at all. Just the right type of instrument: Stichting Huygens-Fokker: Fokker-organ (An abnormally large number of fingers and feet may also be usefulā¦)
Actually, somebody built a more practical version 400 years before that attempt: Archicembalo - Wikipedia
Keyboards with āsplit sharpsā that give a practical subset of meantone temperament, with anything from one to all 5 of the āblackā keys split so the front and back of the key played different pitches, were quite widely known before well-temperament and equal temperament made them obsolete.
I worked on a 31-tone project a few years back, involving around 10 instrumentalists and four singers, and weāre repeating it with a group of current Birmingham Conservatoire students hopefully next year. It certainly wasnāt easy for anyone, but coming to terms with how it ought to sound wasnāt particularly challenging.
but differences of 5 or 10 cents played by ear - that is nearly impossible if you donāt have perfect pitch. so the differences in all of these Helmholtz accidentals are impossible to adapt imho and I just ask myself where is the sense in using 31 EDO for human beings?! You can construct a keyboard in 31 EDO but you canāt tune a violin or a human voice in 31 EDO.
Iām very much interested in writing music in 31 EDO but I just donāt get the āconnectionā in my head how it would be possible to bring it on stage or what skills my musicians must haveā¦
Thatās exactly what I mean: keyboards āyesā - you can construct them for 31 EDO. But why writing music for other instrumentalists and voices?
If I look at people like Jacob Collier, he might be able to sing in 31 EDO. But if you need a whole choir of āJacob Colliersā you might have to pay thousands of Dollarsā¦and a violin player in 31 EDP - let him practice 5 years and even then he might not get the exact good finger positionsā¦
Steve, could you explain that more precisely please? How do you explain it to the musicians/singers? How do they practice that?
I know, itās a Dorico forum, so maybe itās better to do that with PMs? Donāt know.
Iāll PM.
Having done it, I just canāt agree with you, Peer. The ensemble I was working with did indeed include a keyboard, a specially fretted guitar and a specially fretted bass guitar, but also regular strings and wind instruments. If thereās something fixed for other people to tune to then it really doesnāt take more than a few weeks for people to become accustomedā¦
To paraphrase the Jerry Lee Lewis song hit-
āThereās a Whole Lotta Fakinā Goinā Onā.
The difference between an equal tempered 5th and a just intonation 5th is about 2 cents, or 1/50 or a semitone.
Any good string player can produce either of those on demand when playing. Good singers can probably do the same.
They key to getting a good tone on a string instrument is to hit the exact pitch which resonates with the harmonics of the other undamped strings. That is also a matter of small fractions of a semitone, and not having learned to do it reliably is part of the reason why beginners learning the violin sound so terrible.
Dividing an octave into 31 parts might be novel, but the skills to accurately control pitch are not.
1 Like
It was not about that. I just couldnāt imagine how to do that and am interested in how you guys practice that with musicians.
+1 from me.
I am simply waiting and waiting with re-notating a bunch of scores so that I can also do this.
There are no other programs that do this āeasilyā.
I would love to see Dorico beat the pants off of them with THIS added.
Dorico team:
Do you realize just HOW many composers whoāve been frustrated by this would consider jumping aboard for JUST this?
Please consider putting this high on the agenda in the next release.
Seriously.
So, Iām wondering if any of the āImprovisation Box and Arrowsā style of notation would be implemented in the next version of Dorico?
If not, Iāll be bummed because I really canāt wait too much longer-
I will have to go back to doofy Finale and re-notate them there.
They were originally in Finale, but an ancient version, and it never does a great job on ancient versions
(I have to keep an old computer with an old version of Finale on it JUST for this. Its so annoying).
So, I was hoping I could just start fresh with Dorico, again.
My guess is that the workarounds you would need to employ in Dorico for this kind of thing are not really much more cumbersome than doing things in Finale, if you use things like graphic frames and SVGs etc. Obviously Dorico lacks the Shape Designer that Finale has, but I think youād probably find it easier to use a dedicated illustration program to produce the arrows and other similar notations you need, then bring them into Dorico as graphics, than to wrestle with the Shape Designer. Future versions of Dorico will certainly enrich its support for contemporary notations, but we canāt do everything in a single version, and there are still gaps in more common practice notations that we will need to fill before we can tackle these more extended techniques.
Thanks for your response Daniel. Iām still trying to get used to having a software company whose developers care and respond quickly. Itās a bit new to me.
Iāve always done it all in Finale, never having to import graphics, etc. The shape designer is indeed goofy in Finale (always has been), but it got the job done with only a few steps. I truly am ignorant of the other methods simply because I have not been forced to use them. Anyone care to give an old dog some tips on where to start with this in Dorico? What methods and processes do you folks out there in the real world use?
Well, I have to disagree with Danielās assessment. When you factor in parts, for example, that sort of workflow breaks down and it is not at all viable in any workable timeframe. If you have loads of time and are gunning for a masterpiece of a score, sure: go for it. Daniel knows, or at least imagines, that Iāve stretched Dorico into areas where it has, currently, little standing, out of my own stubborness ā do read it as a compliment to the software. But if you really want to try overlaying graphics, you are better off doing all of that on a dedicated vector drawing software, after the conventionally-notated parts are done.