I am working on a project and cannot replicate this without an annoying and inconsistent workaround. It is common enough and really cool. Thank you.
Also, the double bar is not possible without a workaround, as it rewrites the dotted half as a quarter tied to an eighth tied to another eighth over the barline. Would be nice to have a more flexible (visual, not metric) double barline for situations like this. Of course, if I’m just missing a checkbox somewhere, please let me know!
I don’t have an answer ready for the centered beams, but for the dotted half before the double barline you could use a 6:5e tuplet (and remove one eighth rest after it).
That’s a cool solution! Could also then do a triplet for the last three notes instead of removing a rest. My solution involved moving the double-bar over and moving the notes over both manually. The beam involved hiding stems and using lines and try my hardest to get the positioning and the line thickness right. Annoying when you are engraving old music and trying to remain true to it as much as possible. Definitely don’t want the software to stand in your way in those moments.
For the double bar line, I just placed the caret where I want the double bar line, pressed SHIFT + B , added two pipe characters (||) in the popover, and pressed ENTER/RETURN to place the double bar line where needed.
Choosing the three resulting eighth notes and the single eighth and using the Beaming option from the right-click context menu let me connect the four eighths together.
To date Dorico does not have an automated way to handle the simultaneous up and down stem eighths at the same rhythmic position.
One way to obtain the first centered beam in your example is to enter the notes as shown in the first measure below. In engrave mode, select the noteheads to the right of each stem on the lower staff, suppress their playback and hide the noteheads. Then select the beam and move it up between the staves as shown in the second measure:
To make the hidden noteheads invisible, execute View > Note And Rest Colors > Hidden Noteheads.
@johnkprice I was just experimenting with this (I like these puzzles too), and found basically the same solution. You beat me to it.
I first tried unisons using Shift-I 1 enter, which produces 2 noteheads next to each other, but apparently Dorico doesn’t keep track of which note should be left or right, and after closing and reopening the project (I just had to check) the notehead invisibility was randomly distributed and therefore unreliable. Turning the pseudo-chords into seconds resolved this.
If one is being particularly fussy, then after the beam is moved up between the staves, the stems don’t perfectly align with the unhidden notes on the lower staff no matter whether the pseudo-chords are unisons or seconds:
Obviously, the stem is defined to be drawn between the beam and the top note, which makes sense because the beam is ‘officially’ below the chord. Food for thought
