Fixing triplets / note respelling

Dorico
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Greetings, helpful people. I’m doing my biggest project yet in Dorico 4 and have a few nagging questions. Btw I am definitely planning on getting Dorico 5, but don’t want to change horses midstream. Hoping to finish this piano score asap and then get D5 before I start orchestration.

This project has some tedious elements… one of them is that it’s based on MIDI imported from Ableton Live, which has extremely primitive, amateurish MIDI export capabilities (one track at a time, no tempo maps, etc).

A couple of questions that keep coming up:

  1. Changing notes to or from tuplets. For a common example, if my imported MIDI gives me quarter note triplets, but I want dotted-eighth, dotted-eighth, eighth (or vice-versa) what’s the best way to convert this? I have tried various methods but usually get so frustrated that I give up and delete all the notes and re-input them. Any tips, or resources for me to check out are welcome.
  2. It seems that sometimes I will respell a note name (Db to C# for instance) in the full score, or in a part, and it will propagate through all parts with that instrument, and other times not. Why is this?
  3. I have playback questions but just found something helpful from @dspreadbury about re-applying the playback template that seemed to help. It’s still a bit of a mystery, this area.

I have a lot of notes of feature suggestions / requests but maybe some of them are already in Dorico 5. Fingers crossed. Anyway I’ll post those at some point.

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Try Edit>Requantize… on those sections using the quantization unit as semiquaver and no tuplet detection.

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Do you have your Prooerties set to Global or Local? This may make a difference.

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Enharmonics adjusted in the score(s) pass through to the parts.
Enharmonics adjusted in the parts are not reflected in the score.

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Thanks for the answers! So, I’m basically creating piano reductions from unpolished, semi-orchestrated MIDI files. Because the full score is large and very messy, I have been creating a custom Instrumental part (with just piano and voices) and have been working from that, thinking that the changes I made would be reflected everywhere. Thankfully of course all the important stuff is, but it turns out cosmetic things like note respellings aren’t.

Btw, I created the part by just duplicating the piano part, then adding the instruments I need to it and renaming it “Piano Reduction”.

If I need my changes reflected everywhere, can I do that while working from a part?

@DanielMuzMurray where do I find this Global / Local property setting? Is it per part or…?

Also a big question: for all the work I’ve done in parts so far, can I make it propagate through the whole score? Or do I need to go fix things again in the score…?

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@Janus thank you! I should probably set a shortcut for this if there isn’t one already, I’m doing it so much.

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@dspreadbury thanks for this link… but I think it just broke my brain even worse, haha.

Is this Global/Local setting in the properties area specific to each part/score?

Could you help me with a concrete example? For instance, let’s say I’m looking at just the part for my Baritone, and I notice a Db that should be a C#, and I want that to be changed everywhere. Do I need to select that note, open the properties area, choose “global”, and then respell the note?

If that’s the way, then I have 2 questions:

  1. How can I make this the default behavior for all parts? Doing this for every note is more trouble than shifting to the full score layout to make these fixes, and I’d like to have it be consistent throughout instead of note-by-note.
  2. Is there a way to do this retroactively? I’ve already done a huge amount of work fixing up these parts before I realized this issue.
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Maybe you can use Respell Notes Automatically if the mess you accidentially created is to big. This will overwrite all deviations in score/parts.

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No, you need to go back to the full score layout (which you can do by hitting W, the shortcut for Window > Counterpart Layout) and respell the note there.

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Thank you for clarifying that @dspreadbury .
Btw I found a nice workaround that I can share. I wanted to see just my 3 vocalists and the piano, to input lyrics. But in that process I find a lot of little things to fix like the spelling of accidentals, etc. But I didn’t want to have to remember to switch between Score and Part each time I fixed an accidental. So in Setup mode, I duplicated my Full Score layout, but removed all the players I didn’t need (making it, effectively, a duplicate of the part I wanted to work with, but, in Dorico’s view, still officially a Score, not a Part). Then I used that to put in all my lyrics and made all my corrections. Then I could delete that temp layout. I’ve been using this approach since then and it’s been working well.

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