Gregorian

steveparker · January 15, 2019, 12:06am

Derek, Gregorian chant is a very big thing in eastern Europe. I once found myself at a large Gregorian conference in Lithuania… long story…

AaronGiles · January 15, 2019, 12:43am

Thanks, Romanos! I had a lot of fun putting it together.

You must have persevered since the direct link I gave doesn’t work. You have to go in through the front door at https://seattlevics.org and click on the link from there. Silly cross-linking permissions…

Romanos · February 9, 2019, 4:02pm

Feature request for V3: assignable shortcut option for “hide stem”. I was hoping this would be added in 2.2.10 but it wasn’t. This would be tremendously useful to me, especially since you can’t access the option in write mode.

dspreadbury · February 10, 2019, 12:17am

Because you can’t access the property in Write mode, that would also preclude any key command for setting it from working in Write mode, I’m afraid. However, if you graft the following into your keycommand_en.json file in an appropriate way (use JSON Lint to check the JSON is still valid afterwards), you can already have a shortcut for this property:

			{
				"context" : "kEngraveMode",
				"shortcuts" : [
					{
						"UI.InvokePropertyChangeValue?Type=kNoteHideStem&Value=true" : [ "§" ]
					}
				]
			}

dan_kreider · February 10, 2019, 1:51am

Aaron, that’s a beautiful collection. I know from experience how much time that must have taken!

Daniel, sorry to be helpless, but this is such a useful feature for me that I think I may be willing to venture out onto the tightrope, but I’m not sure what do to. Can you (or anyone else) walk me through it? Thanks!

PF_Slow · February 10, 2019, 5:09am

benwiggy wrote: ↑Fri Jan 11, 2019 2:38 pm
The Klemm Medieval plug-in may work well, but it’s very expensive.

Expensive is a relative term. For what it does, I quite disagree. It exists. It works in Finale. Those of us for whom pen and ink is no longer practical think it a godsend. It must not be easy to code or else I think we’d have seen it for Sibelius 15 years ago.

Not everything needs to work in Dorico. For that matter, there is so much that should have higher priority than plainsong.

If you want free, there’s always the Gregorio project as has been linked earlier.

Plainsong illustrates (pun intended) the fundamental issue that affects all notation: If music could be written, it would be easy. As Deems Taylor wrote so many years ago, it was those monks centuries ago who figured out that drawing music was the key to notation — as we’ve been doing ever since.

Romanos · February 10, 2019, 2:31pm

I second Dan on this. Holy moly would this speed up my workflow but I haven’t the faintest idea how to accomplish it.

pianoleo · February 10, 2019, 3:32pm

Find your key commands file:
On Mac, it’s in ~/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 2; on Windows, it’s in %APPDATA%\Steinberg\Dorico 2. The file is called e.g. keycommands_en.json, where the final two letters following the underscore reflect the keyboard language chosen in the Key Commands editor.
Open it in a “proper” text editor. I’m using TextWrangler here; Daniel Spreadbury has previously recommended Sublime Text, BBEdit, and SciTE. It looks like this:

Copy Daniel’s code using the forum’s Select All button and Ctrl/Cmd+C. Knowing where to paste is the tricky part. I could try to explain how the different types of brackets mean different things (objects vs arrays), and that for each open-bracket you need a close-bracket, but it’s probably easier if you just look at Daniel’s example carefully:

See how there’s a curly open-bracket off to the left at the top, and a curly close-bracket that vertically aligns at the bottom?

You have to paste after the appropriate close-bracket in your shortcuts file. In my case, the two purple curly brackets show me where the previous “context” starts and ends, and all I’ve done is inserted a line after the appropriate curly close-bracket:

In this GIF you’ll see me paste Daniel’s tweak exactly. Then I need to insert a comma after the previous curly close-bracket, and I need to make sure that the first curly open-bracket in my pasted code vertically aligns with the curly close-brackets I highlighted in purple in the previous image.

Now choose a shortcut and put it in the right place. I’ve chosen Ctrl+Alt+9. Note that if you’re on Mac, Dorico will correctly interpret “Ctrl” as “Cmd” when it reads this code.

Select All and Copy and Paste the whole document into www.jsonlint.com. Hit the Validate button at the bottom. If you get a nice green “Valid JSON” response, you’re sorted. If you get a red response with some incomprehensible text, read these instructions again, try again, and if you continue struggling then post something on this thread.
Save the keycommands file.
Open Dorico and use your new shortcut.

Note that a) this only works in Engrave mode and b) it’s not a toggle. You’d need a separate shortcut for turning OFF Hide Stems, which I’m guessing would be:
“UI.InvokePropertyChangeValue?Type=kNoteHideStem&Value=false”

pianoleo · February 10, 2019, 3:52pm

Addendum: if you have the old-style keycommands file, the one that’s nearly 900 lines long, you don’t need the whole chunk of text from Daniel, you just need this bit:

{
						"UI.InvokePropertyChangeValue?Type=kNoteHideStem&Value=true" : [ "§" ]
					}

Find the kEngraveMode context, scroll to the bottom of that section, add a comma after the last curly close-bracket (the line above the square close-bracket), and paste.

Steps 1, 2 and 4-7 are the same. It’s only Step 3 that differs.

LSalgueiro · February 10, 2019, 4:02pm

Or, you know, you could just record a quick macro to switch modes, switch the toggle and switch back. It can be done in two seconds, with no hazard for those who find messing with the code daunting, and it’ll have minimal footprint when compared to the hard-coded shortcut.

dan_kreider · August 16, 2020, 12:06am

Howdy folks,

I’m about to need to set a good bit of chant using traditional neumes, and I’m circling back around to see if it can now be faked in Dorico, perhaps using custom notehead sets, or perhaps custom playing techniques?

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

benwiggy · August 16, 2020, 9:19am

I’ve replied to your similar post on FaceBook, but it’s worth saying here as well.

Plainsong is so different in terms of spacing rules and positioning, and the functioning of symbols, that all Dorico’s rules for ‘normal’ music will be fighting you every step of the way.

There is a large body of chant available as vector graphics, or as text-based gabc code, here:

An online interpreter for gabc code is here:
http://apps.illuminarepublications.com/gregorio/?fref=gc

Details for the gabc language are here:

There’s also an automatic psalm-generator here:
http://bbloomf.github.io/jgabc/psalmtone.html

Romanos · August 17, 2020, 12:53pm

I second Ben that the illuminare editor seems to be the best for rendering GABC code right now although there are a few other engines out there. The big advantage of the illuminare is that you can control the size of the output and aren’t forced to standard sizes. The “problem” is you have to code the chant in. If the chants are any of the standards, leveraging the gregobase dataset is a godsend. I’ve used it a few times to anglicize certain chants; I get the original chant and then simply change the text. Muuuuch quicker than trying to code the whole thing all over again. My one complaint is that the auto-hyphenation feature can be a bit of a pickle at times, sometimes adding a hyphen where you don’t want one and skipping one you were sure would be there. (Spacing can be a tad finicky too.)

dan_kreider · August 17, 2020, 2:35pm

Thanks guys. I ended up going back to Medieval 2 on Finale. It works quite well, actually. $220 tho, sadness.

Romanos · August 17, 2020, 3:05pm

I almost bought finale last year just to buy this plugin but then I demoed finale and hated it so much I couldn’t bring myself to do it, even with crossgrade pricing.

(Funny side-note: We just moved a few weeks ago and are still unpacking. Yesterday I stumbled across my old CD-rom of Finale 2012 and chucked it. Found my Sibelius 7 cd’s too.)

dan_kreider · August 17, 2020, 3:44pm

The only reason why I went with Medieval 2 is because it’s basically a totally different interface from Finale… a program within a program. The output is lovely, and it’s very easy to use.

It’s not Dorico, though. Looking forward to the future.

Romanos · August 17, 2020, 6:43pm

Yes… I really hope he ports it over, which, according to a 2017 interview with ScoringNotes he’s open to. I still expect it will be a while though (if it happens at all).

dan_kreider · August 17, 2020, 6:49pm

I think it’s unlikely (though I speak from ignorance). I imagine it’ll just happen natively in Dorico at some point. Maybe collective bribes…? wink, wink…

Romanos · August 25, 2020, 5:33pm

Or perhaps he will become a Dorician himself (I think he is already?) and will eventually want the tool for himself within Dorico, thus necessitating porting it over. And then I hope he’ll share it with us.

As much as I love GABC… I don’t. lol. Same reason I don’t use lillypond: I don’t want to code in my music.