Goldberg Variations - II

[Peter_Roos]

@Daniel at Steinberg

Peter, it will be much easier to tell why bars aren’t deleting from version 1.0.10, as you’ll see signposts for e.g. hidden time signatures, which I suspect is what’s causing the problem. The Write > Trim Flow feature will only delete up to the last actual event in the music, and the last event in the music can be invisible (e.g. an irregular bar caused by having deleted a time signature or similar). In 1.0 you can’t see that these things even exist, and of course it’s also easy to inadvertently create such a situation by deleting a barline accidentally. In 1.0.10, it’ll be harder to delete barlines by mistake (they won’t be included in the selection when you click in the staff to select music, and they won’t be selected via marquee selection either), and when they do occur, you’ll be able to see them and hence delete them.

You should be able to force the deletion of bars by double-clicking in the bar before the bar(s) you want to delete, such that the caret appears there, then type Shift+B to show the bars and barlines popover, and type e.g. -3 to delete three bars, starting with the bar following the caret’s current position.

We definitely have more work to do to make this more obvious and easier. There is a missing bit of user interface that we hope to add soon, which we call the system track, which will appear above the top of every system and provide an easy way to insert bars, delete bars, and select all the music across all players (including system-attached things like tempos, rehearsal marks, time signatures, key signatures, and so on).

As for voices, I suspect the issue might be that you are hitting Shift+V every time you want to switch to another voice, which you don’t need to do: once you’ve started using a second voice anywhere on a staff, you can switch between the voices you’ve used by hitting V on its own.

Unfortunately the editing functions provided to allow you to sort out extraneous voices easily are not there yet, and alas they won’t be included in 1.0.10 as we had planned (some bugs and other problems with copying and pasting in the end took priority), but we will come to these as soon as we possibly can.

Very cool --thanks Daniel.

I’m a dimwit when it comes to mastering new programs, if you can explain it to me, you can explain it to the whole world.

What dimwits like me and others really need, is a simple user guide. Just step by step, one simple step at a time.

Love you man. Happy Thanksgiving to you and the family!!

[k_b]

Happy Thanksgiving to you and the family!! >

just out of interest: are there Thanksgiving ceremonies outside the US.?

[Derrek]

Canada has one, and UK has a similar “holiday” IIRC–but they are not on the same date as the one in the US.

[Robert_Enns]

Canada’s is in early October when the weather is better and the leaves are turning color.
But the bigger difference is that it is not nearly as important as Christmas, unlike the US where Thanksgiving is the main holiday and travel becomes a nightmare.

[Vaughan_Schlepp]

Canada’s method distributes the holidays slightly better. One’s stomach has a little more time to recover from one greedy gut season to the next.

[Peter_Roos]

Well, I think I’m getting the hang of it … here’s Variation No. 1. Looks a lot better than what I made of the Aria, doesn’t it? For one thing, there are no weird colored voices, or wacky additional bars.

This only took me a couple of hours, focusing on one voice / staff at a time … just inputting the notes. I think I’m getting the hang of it … I think the trick is to input one voice at a time.

Obviously there’s still a lot that can be improved:

1. Cross staff beaming - how do I do that? (e.g., bars 21, 22, 24)
2. Cleff changes (e.g. bar 13 and 14) - how do I do that?
3. Print layout is less than ideal - bar 16 should end on page 1, bar 32 should end on page 2; should be printed on two pages. How do I do that?
4. How do I get the subtitle (Variation No. 1) to display in print mode?

Thanks!
Goldberg Variations - Variation 1.zip (226 KB)

[MarcLarcher]

In Write mode

1. Cross staff beaming : bar 21 left hand staff, just select g and press n, do the same for the next two notes. Same on bar 22
2. Select you first low f, press shift+c, write f. Select “high” a two notes later, press shift+c, write g in the popover
3. In Engrave mode, select the first note of the first bar, command-click the last note (rest) bar 16 and click "make into frame (second option of Format Music frames on the left panel). The result is ugly.
   Open Layout options (cmd+shift+L) and reduce size to 4,5pt. To make it better, click on the first note bar 20 and insert a system break (cmd+alt+S — this might change in the forthcoming update). I did the same bar 24
   In Layout options, select note spacement page, and change the justify value (last value you can change on this page) to something like 50%, the last system will be justified too.

[MarcLarcher]

To get your subtitle in the title page, you must edit your masterpage layout.
To achieve this, in Engrave mode, double click on the first pages of Masterpage menu, in the right panel.
Shorten the music frame on the right page (which actually masters your first page), in order to make room under the title (where {@flowTitle@} is written), create a text frame under there and write {@flowsubtitle@} — choose font and centering and all the stuff as usual. Close the masterpage editor (up and right corner) and that’s it.
I attach the file
Goldberg Variations - Variation 1 edit.dorico.zip (232 KB)

[Vaughan_Schlepp]

Good advice, Marc. I’ll look at the files when I get a chance. I wish it were as easy to learn to play the Goldberg variations as it is to learn to notate them in Dorico!

[lbuckley]

What happens when you edit the LEFT panel of the master page layout? I can’t see any result anywhere.

Thanks, as always.

[Vaughan_Schlepp]

This is turning into a fun project. Shall I give Variation 2 a go?
Anyway, I hope you don’t mind but here’s Variation 1 with a few changes. There were a couple of wrong notes (bb. 8, 14 and 22) and in b. 22 the RH note shouldn’t be tied over from the previous bar. The last note in the first half should be doubled and in bar 22 the last rhythm in the LH should be dotted. BTW, I really like Dorico’s ability to turn a series of 8th notes into dotted 8ths + 16ths by just clicking on the beam (or as many beams as you like) and pressing the dot key. There were also some layout things I changed. In the original, the first three bars are beamed through the whole bar in the LH and in similar places later; this gives a little more a feeling of unity. I changed some stem directions and kept the LH part in the bottom staff. Too bad that Dorico doesn’t yet flatten beams properly and there still aren’t any settings which work in the majority of cases, so I changed the default beam angles and tweaked the rest by hand.
Goldberg Variations - Variation 1 edit 2.dorico.zip (235 KB)

[Vaughan_Schlepp]

Oh yes, I also moved the last fermata away from the last note and onto the barline (a nice, easy operation in Dorico!). In these cases the fermata doesn’t mean anything more than those in the Bach chorales which just tell you where the end of the phrase is or, in this case, the end of the variation.

[Vaughan_Schlepp]

Here’s the 2nd variation. Reduced the size so that it would fit on one page. Interesting how much tweaking is still necessary. Only two things can’t be done (besides the workaround for the ornaments). One is, of course, the 1st and 2nd endings. And I wonder if it’s possible to have a double bar at the end of bar 17 AND a forward repeat at the beginning of bar 18 (which should be numbered differently with 1st & 2nd endings).
Goldberg var 2.dorico.zip (133 KB)

[Peter_Roos]

Very cool … Vaughn, how do you change the beams in Variation No. 1 (such that they are grouped together for all the notes in bar 1, 2, 3, etc.)?

Thanks for the feedback everyone … don’t think I would have been able to figure this out on my own.

[dspreadbury]

Depending on the pagination of your layout, you might find that (say) the first page of a layout ends up on a left-hand page rather than a right-hand page, which is why every master page definition includes both a left- and a right-hand page.

[Vaughan_Schlepp]

@Peter Roos

Very cool … Vaughn, how do you change the beams in Variation No. 1 (such that they are grouped together for all the notes in bar 1, 2, 3, etc.)?

You can either select the first and the last notes in the group or drag-select all the notes, whichever is easier, and then from either the Edit menu or from the Contextual menu select Beam Together under Beaming. This works unless one of the notes is tied to or from an adjacent bar. Since selecting any part of a tied note usually selects the entire group of tied notes, If the note in the adjacent bar has a beam, this action will beam across the barline. If the tied note doesn’t have a beam, you won’t be able to beam the other notes together at all. The only way around this is to do it in Engrave mode and be careful to select only the notehead of the tied note within the bar where you want to beam the notes. I hope that isn’t too incomprehensible!
In any case, I’m making more and more macros in an external program so that I don’t have to go through the popovers, menus or properties panels. This can save a lot of time.

[Rob_Tuley]

@Vaughan Schlepp

This works unless one of the notes is tied to or from an adjacent bar … The only way around this is to do it in Engrave mode …

In the 1.0.10 update, there is a “scissor tool” (shortcut shift-U) that can “cut” ties in Write mode to do this sort of thing. See the sticky thread at the top of the forum for more details.

[Vaughan_Schlepp]

That’s indeed possible, but for me it’s be quicker to switch to Engrave mode and select carefully than to break a slur, beam the notes and then re-tie them. YMMV.

[Peter_Roos]

@Vaughan Schlepp

Here’s the 2nd variation. Reduced the size so that it would fit on one page. Interesting how much tweaking is still necessary. Only two things can’t be done (besides the workaround for the ornaments). One is, of course, the 1st and 2nd endings. And I wonder if it’s possible to have a double bar at the end of bar 17 AND a forward repeat at the beginning of bar 18 (which should be numbered differently with 1st & 2nd endings).

Cool - thanks for this Vaughan. Quick question: did you turn off playback by any chance?

I don’t hear anything when I press the play button. I see the green bar moving but that’s it. Other Dorico scores play back fine, to be sure.

Cheers,
Peter

ps speaking of the green bar, in my own Variation No. 1 it has suddenly disappeared. Did I inadvertently turn it off, and if so, how do I turn it back on?

ps 2 while on the subject of the green, and I assume this is in the pipeline, it would be nice if the score would scroll along automatically while the green bar moves from left to right, without having drag the score from left to right.

[Peter_Roos]

@Daniel at Steinberg

Depending on the pagination of your layout, you might find that (say) the first page of a layout ends up on a left-hand page rather than a right-hand page, which is why every master page definition includes both a left- and a right-hand page.

Hi Daniel:

Somewhat related, would it possible, and maybe make more sense, to have a work like this (the entire Goldberg Variations) as a single project, with Flows for each of the Aria and Variations? They all have different time signatures.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the concept of Flows. Or is that more suitable for e.g. a full orchestral work and then reductions for just piano, choir, reduced orchestra, and so on.

Thanks!