FEATURE REQUEST: assign Playing Techniques (or equivalent) to keyboard shortcuts

Hi guys
Would the dev team consider giving users the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to elements other than just articulations i.e. be able to assign shortcuts to Playing Techniques, dynamics and other text expressions?

Example: I’ve configured Dorico so that I can select a note (or notes) and press Option + 1 (as my configured option) to place a staccato marking. However, I can’t configure Playing Techniques, dynamics or any other text expressions the same way…I either have to use Popovers (slow, repetitive and inefficient) or employ an external third-party solution like Keyboard Maestro, which means that I can’t create things on the fly. Either way, it seems to me that Dorico users would really benefit from being able to create our own Playing Techniques/expressions and then be able to quickly assign shortcuts to these.

Given the amazing flexibility of Dorico in terms of allowing users to configure shortcuts, I’m genuinely surprised that the above feature doesn’t already exist.

In any case, thank you for reading and for your consideration!

Cheers

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I find the alt -Click / option-Click very fast - works on practically everything.

And Lua Scripts invoked by the jump bar - that solved quite a few of these cases for me. But I understand you wnat to be able to assign on the fly …

The alt+click functionality is good, but the Finale Meta Tools concept is much more efficient.

I have a bunch of external scripts for dynamics that I use some times, but the way to enter combined dynamics in Dorico is often better.

A work around can be to have a separate window open with a palette of things you want to alt+click, playing techniques for instance.

You can always click on the Techniques in the right-hand panel, and they will appear on the selected note(s).

@LAE, my request is actually coming directly from the Finale Meta Tools concept but with all the stuff happening around here recently, I didn’t really want to say that in my OP. Finale’s Meta Tools are so crazy efficient! I’ve set up some articulations in Dorico like this (e.g. Option + 1 for staccato) but the inability to do this with other Dorico tools is super-frustrating.

What articulations are you wanting to speed up? (the usual accent, staccato, tenuto etc already have key commands…)

I don’t need to speed up articulation entry because it’s already possible to assign keystrokes to these. It’s the expressions, playing techniques and dynamics across multiple palettes. I don’t understand why users can assign keystrokes to articulations but not expressions/playing techniques/dynamics etc. I’d love to assign Option-F to the Forte expression (and so on) but this isn’t possible. It’s strange.

Well, to be fair I used a lot of external scripts in Finale for various things and that’s what I do in Dorico as well.

There are certain things Dorico does much better with dynamics though - you can very easily add something like p < mf > pp with just one popover entry, to multiple staves at the same time.

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Yes, some aspects of dynamic entry are slow - though others (eg. apply cresc ff dim pp across the whole orchestra) are very quick.

I’d guess one limitation might be the shortage of key combinations…

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Yep, I’m finding this to be the case, too i.e. Dorico does certain things better than Finale. But this shouldn’t be about which platform is better: why not just add the ability for users to assign keystrokes to elements other than articulations only, so that we can be super-efficient in even more ways?!

We former Finale users knew you were thinking that anyway. :slight_smile:

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Were you aware that you can specify whatever popover text you want for a playing technique, including a single letter?

For instance for con sord you can give it the popover text “c” and then it just becomes shift-p then C then enter to create it.

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