Expanding on syncopation global options for different note values

Hey all,

I’m a bit dissatisfied with how the syncopation options in note grouping work at the moment. I believe they are working as designed, but I think their global options can certainly be tweaked to be a bit more precise.

The first bar in this example (4/4) I would like to remain in its “notate as single notes” option, but the third bar seems hard to read as a result of this.


However, switching to the other option to split by the beat boundaries yields the reverse; though the first bar isn’t necessarily hard to read, it would be easier (and more common) to see this written as a quarter note instead of two tied eighths. The third bar is now much more readable after using ties that separate beats 3 and 4.

This is what I would like to achieve - essentially different settings for different lengths of notes, which I feel should be handled by different options because, like my example, they are used differently in different scenarios, but the global options do not currently reflect that. This can only be achieved right now (based on my experimentation) through force duration on one example while the other global option effects the non-forced section.

It’s certainly a bit of a hassle in my eyes and I hope the team sees where I’m coming from when it comes to expanding on these syncopation global options. Has anyone else had similar issues when writing? I’d love to see some other scenarios where this has been an issue as well.

Thank you for your time and I look forward to your responses!

(Bump) Any thoughts on this?

Andrew, don’t bump on this forum. It’s severely frowned upon. Every single post gets read by at least one member of the development team (including Daniel), and
a) they’re busy people and sometimes it takes them time to consider stuff
b) they sometimes won’t respond until they’ve given a feature request due thought
c) they sometimes won’t respond at all, but they’ve still read it (and they may sneak things into a future update as a result of the original post)

My apologies - I’ll take note of that. No offense intended!

You might already have searched the forum for the word “syncopation”, but if not, it’s worth doing so. There has been a reasonable amount of discussion about these kinds of situations. We certainly aim to revisit the pattern-matching that Dorico performs in the future, but it’s not in our immediate priorities.