Say I want a fermata over a minim to be 4 seconds long. I have trouble thinking about the percentage you have to enter into Dorico. What is the calculation for this?
Better, what is the general calculation for n seconds? Let’s assume a minim.
What’s the underlying tempo? (E.g. how many seconds is the minim without a fermata?)
At 120 bpm, the minim will be 1 second without a fermata, so you’ll need to make it 300% extra to make it 4 seconds.
Is the percent an add-on or the total time taken?
this is a change/addition I’d like to see in Dorico: for gradual tempo changes, on top of % changes, it would be nice to have absolute changes. For example, a ritenuto “to 66=q”.
60/BPM = BDS (Beat Duration In Seconds)
60/BDS = BPM (Beats per Minute)
@benwiggy Yes, it it add-on extra time, or the duratiioin?
What is tempo is say q= 65? Seems harder.
I want a formula I can put in a spreadsheet.
You will have to round, but 60/65 =0,923 seconds, or about 9/10 of a second
It is extra time. By default, 50%, e.g. equivalent to a dot.
60 seconds per minute / 65 beats per minute = 0.92 seconds per beat.
2 beats (minim) = 1.85 seconds.
You want 4 seconds of note, so the extra is 4 - 1.85 = 2.15 seconds.
2.15 seconds as a fraction of the note (1.85 s) = 1.16.
So: 116%.
I’ve never had to deal with this because playback is not very important for me, but.. oof. This is precisely the kind of task a sophisticated piece of software should be able to take care of in the background after the user simply types in the amount of seconds or beats a fermata has to last… 
I completely agree. I have made an Excel spreadsheet to deal with it. When I polish it I will post it here for people. But, really, Steinberg, why make this so hard? I am quite sure people think in terms of time duration for fermatas not ‘add on percentage extra’.
I’m curious, @Andro, why you want a specific integer number of seconds when your tempo is unrelated to seconds?
As said, if your tempo was 60 or 120, then it’s very straightforward.
Perhaps it would be nice if you could type in “3s” or 3b" for seconds or beats; but it’s a pretty basic schoolboy maths problem – I dare say you could ask AI to do for you, if all else fails.
A tempo expressed as BPM is by its very definition related to seconds (well, minutes, but I’m assuming nobody would want to indicate fermata duration in minutes). If a tempo of q=n goes into a ritardando culminating into a fermata, I’d say seconds is the most obvious unit to define its length for playback. Because a percentage of.. what? The final tempo of the rit. also has to be expressed as a percentage. So the fermata duration is then a percentage of a percentage of the original tempo?
There is no need for condescending remarks about “schoolboy maths problems” (because I’m sorry, but that’s how that remark comes across to me). Good for you if you enjoy doing this kind of stuff, but a lot of musicians don’t and some people really struggle with this. In a program like Dorico, they really shouldn’t have to.
I’m curious.
If the piece would be played by an actual orchestra, would you make a note for the conductor to wait exactly 4.0 seconds too? And give him a stopwatch ?
Really?
Of course not. (Though I actually have seen and played pieces where in senza misura sections the duration of fermatas was defined in seconds, in both the score and the parts. But that is really completely beside the point. This is about playback in Dorico. Which you know, because that is also literally in my sentence that you quoted).
As I said, I don’t have much use for playback myself, but if one needs to create a mockup I can imagine one would want control over the lenght of fermatas. A quick way to tweak that would be very useful in those cases.
What about my favourite Casorti Bowing exercise…?
is each one of those whole notes intended to be played as a single bow? because I had an entire orchestra bitch and moan because I had a very slow tempo in one of my works and a dotted half note apparently stretched the bowing capacity of these musicians. (the concert master ended up removing almost every single slur in the movement! the effect was… sad, to say the least.)
Yes! It’s part of a fabulous set of bowing exercises, designed to teach all aspects of bow control. I’ve never managed to complete it, though I can just about do it at double speed.
Obviously it’s not intended for use in the wild!
It’s pretty dependent on range and volume: something low and quiet can be played with almost no bow speed (by angling the bow so that it travels to the bridge as the bow is drawn and using very little weight), but as the player plays higher the bow stroke has to speed up in order to maintain a similar volume (roughly doubling the bow speed every octave), and the higher you go up one string the bow will need to move even closer to the bridge to maintain tone quality. If the dynamic gets louder, that also necessitates a faster bow due to the need for more weight/pressure on the stick and string: if the speed doesn’t increase with weight the sound produced will be very “crunchy”.
I’m not saying to never write long slurs or tied notes in string parts, but there does come a dynamic and registral point where executing the long slur as written will sound pretty bad just due to physics. It’s a little unorthodox, but if you want the sonic appearance of one very long bow with no breaks in the sound you can write the part as a “unison divisi” (I have no idea if there’s a correct term for it), with each note having both a down stem and an up stem and writing in one bowing on each side of the noteheads so that half of the section will play one bowing and the other half will play the other.
hehehe, a passage in the same work of mine uses this technique of dividing only the bowing for each section (much like some conductors do with the opening of the Barber Adagio.)
though from my understanding of what I read, each whole note is actually a complete up → down bow, so 30 seconds in each direction rather than a whole minute on the single note.
obviously this means that the switch in bow direction has to be absolutely perfect, so that one does not hear the change.