Dotted grace notes

Hi,

I’m wondering if it is possible to create dotted grace notes. If not, how can I align the eight note in the lower voice with the first 16th note of the upper voice?

Thanks for your help

It appears that dotted grace notes are not possible. I also tried making the group of three into a triplet, without success.

Because the lower grace note is at the same rhythmic position as the middle note of the group of three, they share edit handles (in Engrave mode > Note Spacing) and will move together.

I found two ways of aligning the eighth note in the lower voice with the first of the three grace notes in the upper voice. Neither is completely satisfactory.

  1. (Assuming that it is for piano, which might not actually be the case) if the lower voice is placed in the left-hand staff, it can be moved independently in Engrave mode > Note Spacing.

  2. If the three grace notes are changed to become 32nds rather than 16ths, then the lower grace note will be at a different rhythmic position and can be moved independently in Engrave mode > Note Spacing.

In both cases, you will need to do some experimenting regarding which of the edit handles to use.

Edit, after some more experimenting:

Try this.

Change the rhythmic grid to 16th (lower left corner of window or Write > Rhythmic Grid > 16th Note).

Select the lower grace note.

Press alt-shift-right arrow.

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This is a great discovery. @dspreadbury: since grace notes are apparently really capable to support some currently restricted quite regular operations, is there any chance that you could lift these restrictions?

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I think this is the wrong goal. Grace notes do not traditionally align rhythmically; this is a quirk of Dorico in the first place. Please see this thread. Normally all grace notes are placed right before the main note, which can be done in Engrave mode.

Fair enough. I am excited more for suddenly being able to have dotted grace notes.

Still, there are rare cases where you would want alignment. A property for this would be nice, maybe with an Engraving Option. For example, I can imagine situations where I would like coinciding grace notes within several voices of an individual instrument to align, but this should not necessarily happen between several such instruments in a score (unless… it should, in which case I could still use the property).

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Thank you so much Steven! What a funny thing!

Mark, I agree with you when it concerns different instruments. In my case, it is preferable to have them aligned. It would be a cool feature to choose whether they are aligned or not.

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At all, I wonder, why it’s not possible to align notes in a somehow graphical mode freely, like in Cubase/Nuendo, as it can be especially useful to fit fast passages into a system, avoiding line breaks and saving space. For this purpose, Dorico is a bit complicated. In result I can save about 10 to 30 percent pages on Nuendo compared to Dorico, means many page turns avoided, making practising scores more comfortable-

I’d argue that Dorico’s rastral size and note spacing options are far superior to anything available in Cubase/Nuendo. Making a small change to note size can have a radical affect on notes/page and still retain an elegant layout, all done automatically without the need for moving individual notes.

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