Suppose I come up with a new little tune, and I stick it into Dorico in terms of mostly quavers.
Then suppose I think to myself, oh, actually this would be easier to read/conduct if I present it in terms of crotchets instead.
Can I highlight that tune and tell it to double all its note & rest values, i.e. double itself in bar-length, remaining otherwise identical?
(or potentially, depending on the situation, halve the length or multiply by 3 or whatever?)
I don’t know if that function exists, and I’m just not using the right search term to find it.
If it doesn’t already, please could it be put down as a feature request? I guess you’d want it to have a “wait are you sure” if a multiplication would overwrite anything else, but other than that, it doesn’t seem like something that would be particularly tricky for a computer to take care of.
Make sure Insert mode is active (in Write mode) then select everything and choose Write > Edit Duration > Double Note Duration. This won’t play with tuplets particularly well, but because you can remove/add tuplets quite flexibly in Dorico, that shouldn’t be too tricky to sort out as well.
(Insert mode tells Dorico not to overwrite anything, allowing notes to expand/contract without ending up with rests inbetween or overwritten notes.)
IIRC It’s a good idea to keep an idea on implicit measure rests and second additional voices on a staff to be sure they remain positioned properly.
That may have been fixed by now, but it is worth checking.
Thanks Lillie. I’m glad I asked, because I don’t think I ever would have guessed that was the answer!
I think it would be a lot clearer in the menu if there were a choice called something like “Double Phrase Duration”, for which “insert mode” simply switches whether it does or doesn’t overwrite the following bars. The current non-insert mode of Write > Edit Duration > Double Note Duration doesn’t actually “double the note durations” exactly, as far as I can see; it double-lengths some individual notes and overwrites the others, correct me if I’m wrong. I’m not sure of the use case for that, but at any rate it’s a different phenomenon from double-lengthing the whole phrase. And the logic of twinning them means that Double-length-the-whole-phrase is hidden away like a secret trick.
To my mind, the difference caused by choosing “insert mode” in any context should consistently be simply that the results bump the other notes onto later locations and nothing’s overwritten. It shouldn’t change the whole basis of what’s happening.
Maybe there’s some logic to it that I haven’t twigged? I do think of Dorico as something where the logic makes beautiful sense once you know what it is, so this was surprising
(Double-lengthing the tune is doing something odd with the slurs, as well - they weren’t kept with their original notes. One was thrown away, and one ended up a different length. This is on 3.5.)
I think there is some logic to what it does, because it’s consistent with e.g. selecting a bunch of abutting notes and hitting a new duration key. When insert mode is switched off, what this does is go through each selected note from left to right and apply the new duration you’ve asked for. If the edit to the first note, for example, overwrites some part of the second note, then when Dorico comes to think about whether or not to apply the new duration to the second note, it chooses not to, because the second note no longer starts at the position it did when you made the original selection. This is the logic that allows you to select a run of straight eighths (quavers) and hit the . key to transform the whole run into dotted eighth-eighth, dotted eighth-eighth, etc.
When you have Insert mode on, every edit you make “pushes” the next note along by the delta of the duration to the previous note, so Dorico will always apply the new duration to all selected notes.
I understand this I think, but when I select large sections of a score and try this ( with the insert mode on) and select Double Note Durations it SEEMS to move only some of the voices along so that everything is then out of sync. At least as far as I can tell this is what it does. One cue as to what might be happening: after the operation, some of the empty measures now have curious double bar rests in them. I had carefully made sure I selected every bar in every staff, empty (rest) bars included, and tried this a bunch of times but without good results. Am I missing something?
Mac Big Sur, Dorico 3.5. Here’s the file. I just want to double the note values in the first 13 bars. Excuse the messy score - I just opened it from an xml (maybe this is the problem?) and am trying to edit and clean up. 02- The Escape Ladder - Performance.dorico (1.1 MB)
I’m afraid in the case of your project, @Bobby_Previte, you won’t be able to simply use Double Note Durations, because that won’t work reliably in the case of tuplets, of which you have a bunch in those opening bars.
What I suggest you do is create an additional 13 bars after bar 13, to accommodate the lengthened music (select a note or rest at the beginning of bar 14 and type Shift+B to show the bars popover, and enter +13 into the popover and hit Return.
Then select those instruments in bars 1 through 13 that don’t have tuplets of any kind, and use Double Note Durations. For the remaining instruments with tuplets, you’ll have to do the job manually, I’m afraid.
I will add my small voice to making this more functional in future, piling on to your ever-growing list. Oh and, it would be great if the graphic score functions could get better. It would be nice to at least have a straight and a softly curving line that you could simply drag left and right to shorten/lengthen, and that you could position exactly where you want. I’m someone who uses graphics a lot so this is important to me. I suspect others also.
OK keep up the good work. I know you have a lot to do…
Yes, we do plan to add more graphical capabilities to the software in the future. There is so much for us to work on and only a handful of developers on the team, so it’s a perpetual struggle to prioritise.
I just finished an arrangement, to be met with the request from the client “Actually, can we double all the note lengths?”
After mucking around in Dorico with the above methods, I decided that music XML to Sibelius, Double Note Lengths plugin (which included triplets and chord symbols) and them XML back to Dorico was the best solution!
Hopefully that kind of functionality is coming in V6
@Lillie_Harris , I was excited to read your original response. Thank you! This was a long-standing issue with sequencers when I wanted to double or halve the tempo. I haven’t needed this is Dorico yet, but I’m sure I will at some point. Composers often must decide whether a score is readable/countable when the divisions and dots get too small.
