Drum Sets: Wrong duration displayed

When you move a percussion note into an “emergency” voice, only the note and not its containing tuplet will be moved.

For future reference working with tuplets and percussion: is there any way to force a tuplet to also be moved to the new voice, as it exists in grid view?

Not as far as I know, no.

Dear Daniel,

here’s another example, this time there’s no tuplet in the crash cymbal low, still it’s been displayed wrongly, I assume because of the tuplet above. (bar 2, beat 2. compare with the Layout “Drumgrids”)

This time, @Craig_F 's trick sadly doesn’t work either…

It’s really hard to predict this behavior. :frowning:

drums again.dorico.zip (850.6 KB)

(even changing the voice to the existing downstem voice 1 doesn’t work! Now that’s peculiar!)

@klafkid What if you defined them to be downstem in the Percussion Kit rather than using a new voice? Perhaps you could define two instruments of the same type, one upstem and one downstem for different scenarios.

yes, this works… thanks! the project is already quite bloated and every instrument I add just makes everything even slower. But I guess that’s what I would have to go through.

All in all, writing this concerto has proven to me the limits of percussion in Dorico. I love the concept, it’s amazing, but I wish the limitations were less… If charged with this task again, I don’t know if I would use a real percussion kit again.

It’s the same underlying problem as before. Dorico thinks that the low crash cymbal note belongs in the same voice as the up-stem Stahlfeder (steel spring?), which does require a tuplet. When you force it to change voice, it doesn’t reconsider whether or not a tuplet is needed in the new voice, so the note’s duration is still expressed in terms of its tuplet-relative duration, and without a tuplet in the voice it ends up in, that duration doesn’t make sense, so it ends up un-notatable, and shown as a quarter note as a last resort.

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I see. So best is to follow @Craig_F 's advice and create a “real” separate voice for these kind of situations?

Yes, I don’t think you really have any alternative at the moment.

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Came to this thread from:

The accepted solution above doesn’t seem to solve my problem. A couple of workarounds were suggested in the original thread, none of which are perfect.

Wondering if this bug is something that can be fixed?

It’s not a bug, but rather a limitation. Of course given sufficient time and attention it is something that we can overcome, but realistically that isn’t going to happen imminently, so you should find another approach. A second instrument in the kit in a separate voice with the other direction might be the best option.

Hi Daniel,

Understood that there won’t be an imminent fix. For me, the only reasonably usable solution in this scenario (given that many instruments could be used in these triplet fills) is to use a different high hat articulation (which I can force to play back as the intended pedal chick) in an upwards voice.

While I hate to quibble about what’s a bug vs. what isn’t, this situation results in incorrect notation when using documented functionality in its intended use-case. That feels like a bug to me. I guess this only matters if the prioritization of a fix depends on this distinction; if it doesn’t, please disregard.

Thanks,
David

Pardon me, I’m having a similar issue where the hi-hat foot (which should be in a bottom voice like the kick drum) is being mixed in with the tom triplet… I have double and triple-checked in the “edit” menu and there is no “percussion” option. Is this a function I have to activate?

Why can I not simply do as other instruments, right-click the desired note and choose “new up-stem voice” or “new down-stem voice”? The options are limited to “Change voice to next voice on staff”… This “edit-percussion-change voice-reset note destination voice” seems a little onerous compared to other instruments.

I’m using version 4.3.20.1130.

Okay, I’ve answered my first question…

The “percussion” section is in the “notations” menu, just had to try every option.

However, changing the tom triplets to an up-stem voice does this…

I’m just very confused about this… I never had an issue writing drum beats in Finale, but either I’m missing something crucial or Dorico has its own way of thinking about this? Pardon my ignorance but I’m completely at a loss… This (to me) is really unintuitive.


I find it easiest to change hand-struck drum set sounds to up-stem and foot-activated drum set sounds to down-stem, but I do this in the Kit definition.

drumConfig

I learned from looking into Kit definition, thanks for pointing me to it. However, even by switching the tom to an up-stem voice, this is what happens:

I do a lot of solo guitar arrangements which cram many voices into one staff, and having a quarter note below an eight-note triplet is easy as can be. Still quite confused why this is so difficult.

You need to go temporarily into the individual-line display of your kit and apply the tuplet solely to the Tom line. Apparently in your past versions of this measure, the tuplet has been applied to more than just that part, and the quirky nature of percussion kits is hanging onto the tuple in multiple instruments of the kit.

@alexbougiemusic, if you reset the voices in that bar via Edit > Notations > Percussion > Voice > Reset Destination Voice, hopefully things will look a bit more sane, now that you’ve changed the kit definition such that the pedal hi-hat should go into its own voice.

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Thank you to you both for your help, this reset did indeed help. The ease I’ve developed with guitar notation made it more difficult since I was applying the same logic to it. I’ll try to get the hang of this over time.