Entering rests while composing

Hi all, I’m a Finale refugee and have been switched to Dorico when the news broke about Finale stopping. Up until now, I’ve been finishing a couple large pieces I started in Finale, while fooling around with Dorico. Now I’m starting a new piece in Dorico. I have to say even though its a very different way of thinking and takes some time to relearn things I do automatically in Finale after 30 years, I really like Dorico.

But one thing that I’m still having trouble with is the work flow of adding rests while composing. Am I correct that to add a rest I have to hit comma, then the desired duration of rest? If I got a StreamDeck, would there be a way to assign on key to a eighth rest, and another to a sixteenth rest?

Thanks!

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In Dorico, you generally don’t need to explicitly enter rests – you just advance the caret and input the next note you want, and Dorico will provide implicit rests.

In Note Input mode, the space bar will advance the caret by the currently selected input duration, essentially entering a rest of that duration. You can also use the left/right arrow keys to move the caret by the current grid duration.

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Normally you shouldn’t have to enter any rests. Enter the notes in the correct position and Dorico will fill in the rests. Then check Library->Notation Options
note, beam groupings and rests to find the options that you want.

Jesper

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I use “pitch before duration” so this doesn’t seem to work. Unless I’m doing something wrong.

I just tried with pitch before duration and it works here. Using the Mac keyboard, not MIDI.

Jesper

I think the catch with pitch before duration is that you can’t select a duration different from the one you just used to enter a pitch (e.g., enter a quarter note G and then an eighth rest), because changing the duration will enter a new note. But I don’t normally use pitch before duration, so I could be missing something.

FWIW, I also switched to Dorico after many years with Finale, where I was a diehard pitch before duration user. I quickly found that I was able to get much more predictable results in Dorico with duration before pitch, so I switched to that – took some retraining of muscle memory, but I’m glad I did.

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Good point that I missed.

Jesper

I will give it a try. I can see the benefit for copy work, but for composing, not sure I can ever adjust to it.

Does anyone know if Notation Express and a StreamDeck have a way to program one key that would add rests of a specific value?

Ah, I can’t speak to that, because I’m not a composer myself. Maybe someone else will chime in about pitch first vs duration first for composing.

If you are trying to find ways to explicitly enter rests, I think you are working against the program and will cause yourself a lot of extra work, even with StreamDeck.

Better to the arrow keys to move to the next note location on the grid. Additional key combos can change the size of the grid (there’s an item to program into StreamDeck) and concentrate on just entering notes in pitch before duration.

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But the arrow keys don’t always allow for the correct duration of rest. The arrow key just moves the value of the last note entered.

No, arrow keys move the caret to the next grid position.
SPACE moves the caret the value of the most recently entered note.

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