In order to obtain effective playback of fanned / feathered beams, I have been doing the hidden tuplet trick, which involves a lot of steps and can get fairly tricky, even punishing, to tweak. Also if you do not have signposts visible and go to repeat or duplicate the music elsewhere, those tuplets will not copy elsewhere.
Last night I was working on an accelerando where I had set my first and last notes, using the hidden trick (in my case only required one triplet):
It sounded perfect for playback, however the math created a situation where I ended up with a funky collection of ties for the final note. I felt that it would work best to have a simple quarter note as the goal, and the player would know to simply fill out those notes by accelerating toward beat 4. However this resulted in an extra 32nd note rest:
To account for this, I hid the rest, and in the key editor I adjusted the timing of that final note to start a little bit earlier:
While I understand Dorico is being mathematically precise here, in reality the final bit is what I would show a human player.
So it had me thinking, with the many steps required to get here, what if there were a way to create the notes you want to have, and then tell Dorico to fill them out within a given space of rhythmic time with adjustable speed curve presets accessed in the bottom panel? You could select whether you want it to accel. or rit., and then adjust the percentage of the curve between the first and last notes - 50/50 would obviously be linear, but you could create more of an exponential or logarithmic result by adjusting this in different directions.
So with a selection of 12x 16th notes, for example, I could set my start and stop points in rhythmic time (1st and 4th beat let’s say) – and then Dorico does the math based on the percentage I provide it to “unfold” the rhythms needed to fill it out in a natural way, figuring out the spaces in between. So with the start and stop pitches as your “tent poles,” all the notes in between could stretched out to taste. Then if a user wants to tweak this slightly, or reverse it, it would be as simple as trying a different percentage or preset and apply. No need for hidden tuplets and no issues with copying elsewhere.
Or perhaps it would be as simple as leaving the score alone (creating a fanned beam as desired), but addressing this in the key editor for played durations, using midi presets which allow users to quickly adjust timing of playback.
I’m certain the dev team would have a better idea of how to implement such a thing, since I’m no engineer, but I would love to see an ability to work with fanned beams and hear the result without a complicated setup every time. Thank you!
