Basically the idea is you’d have a scratch stave where you’d notate the rhythm and articulations (and possibly dynamics, playing techniques, etc), and then one or more other staves where’d you’d create pitches.
This feature would then combine the two, sampling the current pitches(s) on the target staves corresponding with each note on the source staff, and then overwrite the target staves with the result. This would really speed up entering large ostinato type passages.
In the pic the first 2 bars are the input, and the last two the ouput.
(And yeah, this is the sort of thing a plugin/script would be great at, but I’ve basically given up hope on that functionality ever appearing in a useable way)
This is a nice idea, and one that I think has been suggested before.
We are certainly going to fully develop the scripting side of Dorico in future, but we are a small team and we will only embark on that work when we can see it through.
I think there is a lot of scope for development in this area. Sibelius has a plugin which does this and I would love to see the same function in Dorico. We humans perceive pitch and rhythm as different components and it would be great if these could be edited independently.
Fairly obvious extensions to this would be to create a pattern copier (see the attached example), which copies the relationship between the pitches, and/or a quantizer, which could, for example, convert a broken chord accompaniment into block chords.
