See the title, essentially. This is something I encounter regularly when transcribing orchestral music, whenever there’s a line in multiple octaves which requires some extra, manually-set cautionary accidentals.
Can you provide a little more information, Hugo? Under what circumstances are you finding the accidentals are not shown? Are you using Cmd+Alt+up arrow, or Write > Transpose, or something else?
Sure, I’ll illustrate with a simple, hypothetical use case. Say there’s this line which the cellos and basses play in octaves—a very common occurrence. I enter it in the cello part:
There’s no setting to automatically add a cautionary to the F in bar 5, so I select that note and hit 0 to add one. Then I select the whole thing and Duplicate to Staff Below using my own shortcut, OptShiftM. At this point, the cautionary on the F is still there. But the bass part needs to be an octave lower, so it’s CmdOptDown to get this:
…and now I have to remember to re-add the cautionary.
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Thanks, I understand. I’ll make a note of this and look into it when I get the chance.
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And of course, when the staves are adjacent like this it’s easy to compare the two. Less so with e.g. a violin line copied to piccolo (8va) and glockenspiel (15ma)—those staves can be miles apart.
Would an alternative be to allow cautionaries beyond a single bar?
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That’s also an interesting idea, which would take away a majority of the ‘problem’. However, with things like augmented intervals or cross-relations, you’ll still need some manual cautionaries from time to time.
I’d love this as an option. For example, Finale has the “reset after” setting where you can specify the range to consider cautionaries:
Additionally, it would be great to have a setting to consider a multibar rest as a single bar in combination with a range setting for things like this, which of course must be manually added now:
(Finale’s “Courtesy naturals” is really mis-named. It functions as adding a courtesy to any deviation from the key sig, not just naturals. If I’m in D major and have an F natural, it will add a courtesy # to an F# two bars later with that setting.)
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I would add a voice regarding this request and hope it’s resolved when convenient (of course, rather sooner than later). Not only octave transpositions, but in general when transposing passages with any interval (and tool, be it Shift+I, or Alt+Shift+up/down arrow, or Transpose dialog), the “Accidental” property is reset.
An example case (perhaps a bit convoluted) might be a highly chromatic canon (or 12-tone stuff etc.) that occurs in different pitches (5th, 12th…) in adjacent entries, and after having written the first melody, there’s a good case of applying bracketed accidentals even inside the same bar for cross relations etc. Now when it’s copypasted and transposed, the cautionaries need to be reapplied. (Worksheets with e.g. chromatic/jazz etudes in all 12 keys would be affected by this as well.)
But more than that, it’s about consistency. In Dorico, one of the great things is that it’s mostly very reliable when copying and pasting around objects that have their properties altered, because it’s a huge time saver (to not need to reapply properties again after copying and pasting). But when Accidental property doesn’t behave that way, it’s inconsistent without any reason. Especially as it’s super easy to do the opposite (remove all the forced accidentals manually from a selection, by a simple property switch) manually, if in the pasted/transposed variation the accidentals are not needed — rather than create all of them again.
Curiously, if one has a single note with a forced accidental (like a bracketed one) and it’s selected and then Shift+I => 5 (or any other interval) applied, you see quickly when the popover creates the new note above the first one with the similar visible accidental applied until it’s immediately reverted to “no accidental property active” status. So it would seem that the “default” behavior of Dorico is to maintain this property (as well), but it’s intentional that it’s reset when transposed.
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