I think that if you don’t want cautionary time (or key) signatures between the variations, your only choice is to make each variation in a separate flow.
About the sound not playing back, I believe I used the Steinway piano in the Aria player on my system. I don’t know how Dorico deals with it if you get a file from someone who has used different VI’s. It’d be ideal if Dorico loaded similar sounds according to the setup of the person receiving the file. Perhaps someone from Steinberg will chime in on this.
When you share a project with somebody else, it will only play back with the same sounds if the saved VST plug-in data in the project is compatible with the plug-ins available on your system, which will typically be true if you’re using HALion Sonic SE, but otherwise is very unlikely to be true. You can choose Play > Apply Default Playback Template to get playback working with a project you’ve received from somebody else.
Hi Vaughan–I knew there would be an update, (released yesterday) but didnt know about the second one you mention coming out this year.
Where is the second update mentioned?
Thanks so much!
Bob
The Dorico team mentioned something about another update coming out ‘before the end of the year’.
I don’t know, if anybody noticed: in the example there is a wrong note in bar 8 (left hand). There should be a d instead of an e
Here is variation 3.
The upgrade released on Thanksgiving is a great help - now I can hear whatever notes I put in. That is really helpful, because I can hear immediately when a voice is off.
But that said, a couple of things are still puzzling me:
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When I am in a voice, and a note is highlighted, and I push the buttons on my keyboard cursors left or right, I expect Dorico to play back the notes in that voice. But instead, it jumps from here to there, and I have to go back and see where I left off, and click on the notes manually. Weird!
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Again, about voices, all voices and notes are now black, even when I pick a new voice. That’s much easier on the eyes, but I’d still like the ability to pick a color for a voice, and then when inputting notes, be able to pick a specific voice.
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Again, bars 13 and 14 are too long - doesn’t really bother me, but system break (Shift S) doesn’t seem to work.
Thanks! Love the feedback from this community. 
Goldberg Variations - Variation 3.7z (232 KB)
Which file are you referring to? If it’s the first variation, that and some other errors were corrected in edit 2.
Well done, Peter. You’ve switched the voices around at places which makes it difficult to follow their movement. Did you change the stem directions manually?
- Pressing the left or right arrows moves from note to note in Write mode whereas in Engrave mode it moves between noteheads and other elements like beams and stems. Unfortunately, in Write mode, passing a system break often causes the cursor to jump to another voice.
- I can still choose View Note Colours if I want. Did you look there?
- In Engrave mode, select the first note in bar 13 and the last note in bar 14. It’s easier to do this with the LH notes as the last note in bar 14 is tied and you have to make sure not to select the entire note. Then select make into system in the palette on the left. System break is, well, for breaking the system, not forcing bars into one system.
If you’d like, I could take a look at your file and check the voices, stem direction and rests.
Just found a strange anomaly in this variation. In bar 6, beat 4, LH there’s a natural on the C, which is wrong. It should be C#. For some reason it plays back as C# even though it’s displaying differently. This is troubling.
I’m tempted to move this over into a new thread because there are a couple of things I’d like to ask the Dorico team and I’m afraid they won’t want to wade through three pages of our banter about the Goldberg variations. If they don’t respond to this, I’ll open a new thread.
I’ve included my edit of this variation. The most important worry I have is the accidental in bar 6, beat 4, LH which shows a natural but plays a sharp. I can’t see how this should be possible.
I’ve switched the stem directions around to show the canonic voices. It may seem pedantic but you really have to keep the stem directions of the two voices consistent. This variation is a good notation exercise for that very reason. Dorico handles it pretty well. I still had to tweak a number of ties, beams and rests, though.
One thing I haven’t figured out is how to enter a whole measure rest in the second voice of bars 1 and 9.
There were a couple of ties missing and an extra note. I also removed some of the redundant cautionary accidentals which were could be confusing.
Another feature I’m looking forward to in a future update is being able to adjust horizontal spacing. In Engraving options I decreased the default gap between notes in different voices to ½ spaces and the gap between adjacent noteheads to 0. This adjacent notehead change still leaves a gap between the noteheads (see the first beat in the RH of the last bar) because of the shape of the Bravura noteheads. The reduced gap between voices looks good in most places but Dorico still leaves too much space between noteheads in one voice and flags in the other voice (bar 3, beat 4, bar 5 all beats and bar 7, beat 1).
I hope the Dorico team responds to this!
Goldberg var 3.dorico.zip (237 KB)
Dear Vaughan,
I opened you file and could insert the two whole measure rests in bar one and 9. I use force duration (o), select the right voice (first voice stems down for bar 1, and second voice stems up for bar 9, which is inconsistant…), press coma to insert rest, dot and any note key (abcdefg) and voilà !
I am very interested in all your posts and I am sure I am not the only one following you 
By the way, if Daniel reads this, in bar 9, there seems to be a bug when I add my whole dotted rest : it is written twice, and the left one is clearly wrong.
A single whole measure rest normally signifies an empty voice in any meter, so I assume Vaughan means a whole measure rest without dot…?
It can only be possible due to a bug, of course. Under some circumstances it is possible for a note to end with an explicit accidental design specified as a property: not, unfortunately a property you can see in the Properties panel, and nor is it one that can currently be removed by way of Edit > Reset Appearance (though I have made that change since 1.0.10 was built, so it will be possible in the next update, though I very much hope that the problem that leads to the property being set incorrectly will also be squashed before the next update). The only way to repair a note that has this property set at the moment is, I think, to delete it and add it again.
This is a pretty insidious bug as it will only show itself when you make an edit to the music: if you end up with a note with this property set (which should only happen, I think, if you create the accidental using the right-hand panel for accidentals, rather than using the keyboard shortcuts or the flat/natural/sharp buttons on the left-hand panel), then it will look OK at that point, but if you e.g. repitch the note or respell it, it will continue to show the same accidental, even though under the hood it knows that it should actually use a different accidental.
It’s not good at all and it snuck in at the last minute as we were hurrying to try and get microtonal accidentals working properly from the right-hand panel.
This isn’t possible yet, but we hope to get a button to create an explicit bar rest in soon.
You can now set the gap between adjacent noteheads to less than 0 for this specific reason if you wish, but of course beware that there may be other situations in which this produces a less good result.
Many thanks Vaughan (and Marc, and Daniel).
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Yes, I did change of the voices around, not by design but mistake – e.g., the missed ties between the first and second e in bar 13 and 14, respectively. Interestingly, by just adding those, it fixes not only the voicing issue but also the bar spacing, without having to add any system breaks.
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As to the stem direction, yes I deliberately changed them in e.g. bar 10 and a few other places. I know it’s a violation of the “rules” about stem direction, but the way bar 10 is engraved in the Kirkpatrick score and the way you have it (stems down in second voice), make it difficult to read for me. I admit that I don’t play piano, maybe piano players are used to this kind of thing.
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Voice colors - ah you can turn those on and off!
Yes they still work for me. -
The C natural note in bar 6 is whacky - if you take it out, it still sounds C#, and if instead you add a natural back in, it sounds C natural. Fwiw, I entered the notes by pressing R with my index finger and then, keeping my left thumb on the Alt key, adjusting the pitch with the cursor keys on the right side of the keyboard. I don’t know if that is the fast or most efficient way but that works pretty well for me, since I don’t have to take my eyes off the screen, and I can do one voice at a time.
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I don’t know if this is related, by the way, but in bar 6, LH, I can’t take out the natural in front of the C in the fourth 16th note, or in bar 3 (same spot, 4th 16th note), how did you do that? They are cautionary accidental but normally you should be able to take those out, no? Or is the natural in the LH of bar 6 tied to the natural in front of the C in the right hand (second voice, green).
About the note highlighting in Write mode - that’s similar in Sibelius and it’s a bit annoying, would be better if Dorico would stick to the same voice if you go from note to note.
Cheers
Peter
Oh dear … I started working on Variation 4, and everything was going well, with the voices all being beautifully laid out, until all of a sudden something went wrong. I hit CTRL-Z several times, but it only went from bad to worse.
I swear I didn’t do anything! I even voted for Bernie!
Seriously, what is going on here?! 
Goldberg Variations - Variation 4.7z (201 KB)
I also gave var 4 a try.
Jesper
Goldberg var 4.dorico.zip (215 KB)
That’s very interesting; something similar happened to me recently. I was entering notes and suddenly every note entered pushed the system down a bit and by the time I’d finished the system, there was a huge gap and all the systems after it were squashed down at the bottom of the page. I tried altering the system gaps but that just made a mess so I actually continued in Galley View, saved and closed the file. The next time I opened it, the system spacing was normal. Dorico seems to have this issue with other kinds of spacing, as well, although I can’t find any reproducible cause. Usually quitting and restarting the program solves it, although I haven’t looked at your file yet but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.
As I thought, Peter, your file opens and behaves normally now, at least for me. While this is something the Dorico team should address, it might not be easy, as the problem isn’t easily reproducible.
Jesper, nice work! It’s fun, isn’t it? I question: how did you get the whole bar rests? I’d tried to do this unsuccessfully in var. 3 and Daniel said that this wasn’t yet implemented in Dorico. Those were whole-bar rests in 12/8. I noticed that your whole bar rests can’t be edited to change the vertical positioning, and that trying to select them causes the properties panel to act a bit strange.
Please forgive me but you’re missing a couple of ties (bb. 6-7 and 11-12) and the last note of the first ending (b. 33) should be C#. Speaking of endings, I can imagine that that’s one of the problems with implementation of repeat endings in Dorico: the notes preceding each ending are tied, so you need them to tie over to the first ending but you also need tie ends at the beginning of the second endings. Finale can do this but you have to enter the bar-database to get them to show.
I’d also tend to notate this consistently two voices on each staff with stems up and down for each voice. I know it’s easier to read with the notes on the staves of the hands playing them but…
P.S. That’s another annoying thing. There was a missing tie from bar 29-30 and when I added it, Dorico divided up the 16ths in bar 30 so there were secondary beams on every 8th note pulse. You then have to beam the notes together manually which, because of the tie, can only be done in Engrave mode. In Write mode, the entire d’’ gets selected, including the note in bar 29, so beaming together doesn’t work. In Engrave mode you have to be careful to select only the d’’ notehead in bar. 30. Imagine having to do this for an entire piece! I really don’t like Dorico telling me that this is the correct way to beam 16ths in 3/8!
