I am well into my journey of making the full time switch from Sibelius (15 years on that program) to Dorico, and overall I have to say I love the way Dorico looks, works, and feels. For my particular work though, there are a few things that make life much more difficult, and the main one that I really wish could be addressed is the way Dorico handles slash notation.
By treating rhythm slashes as a different voice, Dorico forces us to make some concessions when it comes to how we write our rhythm section parts. I often want to combine rhythm slashes and regular notation in a single measure. I want to be able to do this quickly, easily, and without creating vestigial rests. Right now the only way to achieve this is either very specific control of start and end voice (which doesn’t always work right for me somehow) or just enter midline B’s and change the note head to oversized slash (which has no keyboard shortcut and also prevents proper playback)
What I would really love to see is the ability to combine rhythm slashes and normal notes in the same voice. Perhaps with a method more similar to how slash region works? A “rhythm slash region” option? This would also make rhythm slashes far more usable and effective for drum set notation as right now Dorico treats added rhythm slash instruments as a 3rd voice.
I’m sure I’m missing something, but I’m still struggling to get the granular control over how my rhythm section parts look that I want, and rhythm slashes being unable to exist in the same voice as regular notation (especially as a mask ala slash regions) seems to be the biggest hurdle I’m currently facing.
Thank you for that suggestion. I’ve used that as well as just very small slash regions when necessary, but this doesn’t solve my issue with combining regular notehead notation and rhythm slashes in a single bar without creating extra rests or fussing around with start/end voice or changing noteheads and turning off playback.
Ah, sorry, I was skimming too fast, saw your comment about changing the midline B’s and assumed you were asking something else. Yeah, I’m in agreement with you. There is a lot of time wasted dealing with Remove Rests when combining regular notation and slash voices here. It also is a pretty serious proofreading issue as sometimes restarting a voice later on in an arrangement can invoke rests to show back on a page that isn’t even visible. I’m not sure what the best solution is, but this is an annoyance of mine too.
To be honest, I think Finale is vastly superior in this area (the only think I like about Finale), with a solution similar to the proposed “Slash voice region”. Would love to see something similar in Dorico!
I kind of like the difference between the default slashes and the slash noteheads with stems. It helps to distinguish where the rhythm is specified versus not.
Here’s an example of what I mean. It’s not the most common usage, but when I take measure 2 and select all but the first note and change to rhythmic slashes, I want to see what’s in measure 1, not measure 3 (I know the workaround using start/stop voice but it’s time consuming, and if there was a way to treat rhythmic slashes as a mask instead of a new voice it could be so much easier)
Janus, I know the effective workarounds, but I’m requesting a quality of life improvement for a future update. I’m by no means an expert, but I can’t think of a single instance where measure 3 of the above example would be appropriate/desired, so it would likely benefit all users (especially those of us who work in commercial settings) if Dorico defaulted to measure 1 by masking the notes as rhythmic slashes instead of using multiple voices to accomplish the task.
I’m not sure how complicated it would become but what I’m asking for is an easy way to mask notes as rhythmic slashes while staying in the same voice.
I’ve run into the same issue as @daltonjazz and I’m always looking for the most efficient workflow. I’m always going back and forth between slashes, rhythmic slashes and notes. I have created a keyboard shortcut for Remove Rests.
I do the same thing by creating the rhythm I want on the middle line and just changing the note head to a slash. That way it’s all in the same voice and doesn’t create any extra rests…
