Hi there,
I’m having some trouble understanding Dorico’s way of handling tuplets.
Triplets are easy enough, just select the duration you want the triplets to fill and press the triplet button.
With different tuplets though is what I can’t wrap my head around.
In the score I’m working on I want a 5plet in the span of a quarter note.
In Musescore (the program I’m entering from) this was as easy as selecting a quarter note rest (or any duration you wanted for the tuplet to span) and hitting Ctrl+5 (or whatever tuplet number you wanted the selected span).
Here there is a popover specifically for tuplets that asks for a ratio, which I can see is useful for inputing very complicated tuplets. But for simpler things like what I’m trying to do it’s just not as straightforward. I’ve never needed to think of my tuplets in ratios and I just don’t know what ratios to input. Guessing them is also taking me nowhere, and the “Inputting Tuplets” page wasn’t much help either.
So… is there some kind of different method to input what I’m looking for (maybe in the tuplet popover itself) or am I just going to have to memorize rhythmic ratios and deal with it?
Also, a side question: When selecting a whole note rest, pressing 5, 6, etc does nothing, it doesn’t break the rest, but breaks note durations. Is this intentional? Is there a faster way of breaking up a whole note rest?
Hello again, the task page for “inputting tuplets” covers the procedure, the full details of what you can enter into the popover are documented separately, here.
If you want 5 notes in the space of one normal quarter note, you probably want the ratio 5:4x (which translates as: five 16th notes in the space of four, i.e. a quarter note).
The ratio goes: [the number of notes you want] : [the number of notes whose standard duration the previous number fits into]
As for rests – unless you’ve explicitly entered a rest, it’s an implicit rest. Essentially, it doesn’t exist as a definite object, it just fills in the spaces around your notes. If you want to split up a whole bar rest into smaller rest durations because you want to input something in the middle of the bar, you don’t need to: just show the caret, move the caret to where you want the thing to go (or just double-click the staff to bring up the caret exactly where your mouse-pointer was), then input the note/notation you want. This is particularly useful for when you want to input a dynamic halfway through a tied note, for instance.
There’s an example of inputting notes not at the start of a bar but not needing to handle the rest yourself included in our First Steps guide for new users, here.
If I may, I think this is a good concept to master while you’re learning duplet entry. Just think about how many notes you want to squeeze into* the time available. 5 sixteenth notes in the time normally taken by 4, means that you type 5:4, and just as Lillie just said, add x if you don’t already have sixteenth notes selected.
(Most tuplets have notes “squeezed into” the time normally taken by fewer notes. Duplets are the main exception, with 2 notes in the time of 3 of the same value, or 2:3.)
In practice, as with most other procedures one learns, after doing it a few times, one doesn’t have to figure it out from the beginning each time – one knows the formula. Also, of course, if you have a lot of quintuplets in a row, it’s usually simpler to create the first one, automatically repeat it as many times as desired, and then go back and adjust pitches as needed.