I’m trying to enter a rhythm in 7/4 and cannot figure out why Dorico will not allow me to do what I want. See the attached screenshot: on beat 3 I want the bottom stave to have a quarter note tied to a 16th on beat 4, and each time I enter it that way Dorico switches it so that the 16th is first then tied to a quarter. I have reviewed the notation settings and can’t understand why Dorico is doing this. Is this a bug or is there some setting I need to check? Thank you very much for any help!!
Hello mjd,
Is this what you want?
If this is it, I did this using Dorico’s “force durations” which is the little ‘clamp’ icon in the "Write - Left Panel’ window.
There may be other ways of doing what you want but I found the “force durations” quite straight-forward to use.
Interestingly, this only happens on certain beats, depending on the subdivisions of your 7/4 measure. For example, the problem goes away at the third beat if you set the meter to [3+4]/4 instead of 7/4 (which defaults to a [4+3]/4 subdivision). Of course that’s not a solution to your problem unless you’re actually using a 3+4 subdivision, and the same strange default behaviour is now seen on beat 5…
Thank you both very much! The force duration worked and I hadn’t understood that feature well. I had used it for overwriting some music where I wanted to keep the durations and change only pitches, but didn’t realize I could use it to force Dorico to create new durations. Thank you!
Still, the question remains why Dorico would default to this strange notation.
In 4/4 and 3/4, everything looks normal. In 5/4 and 7/4, strange things start to happen on beat 2; in 7/4 also on beat 3 and 6. The last one is especially strange:
All notes were input as a quarter, lengthened by a sixteenth note, copied and pasted into various locations. No force duration or any other edits, no changes to engraving/notation options.
That would be Lock to Duration, what you’re describing.
Right: Lock durations (L) for repitching a given rhythm; Force durations (O) to enter rhythms without Dorico overrides.
Great, thank you!
Inputting the 7/4 Time signature as [1+1+1+1+1+1+1]/4 will probably remove all this incorrect notation.
Just a workaround of course.
Jan