What if there is a note with a new dynamics marking in a measure following a hairpin like the following figure? Note that this was imported from Finale and it generates a proofreading warning in Dorico. Getting hairpins and dynamics markings where you want them in Dorico can be very cumbersome. Then, once you manage it, you get a proofreading warning. I guess I don’t see how the intent is unclear. Yes, a conductor will interpret it. An instrumentalist will interpret it. In most real world cases in a human performance does it matter at all if the “p” is at a precisely known location?----Or, it may be that I am simply not as proficient as I should be and that I worry too much about proofreading warnings. I do know that the “p” can be placed where I want it using the caret. It just seems like a cumbersome process.
Another issue is that if I select the hairpin in measure 69 and nudge it to the right (option+command+right arrow), it moves the dynamics markings in measures 67, 68 and 70 as well. Do I need to go into Engrave mode (which I haven’t worked with much yet) to get better control of this?
And I really appreciate the help that Dorico proofreading gives me on the whole. I guess all of the warnings that I decide to ignore would be less onerous if I had checked what proofreading had to offer after the import of each song rather than waiting until the whole two hours and twenty minutes of music was imported. Live and learn.
One can align the dynamic levels left instead of center, which may clarify your intentions.
I think you can trust your interpretation of the music here enough to ignore the proof reading comments; I’d hate to suppose you think the computer is smarter than you every time. (I have proofing turned off: virtually never use it.)
I deleted the dynamics in orange then selected everything in the tuba staff from the start of measure one to the first note in measure 8. I then did a shift+D to get the dynamics pop-up and entered “pp < mf >pp < mf > pp < f” and hit enter. (Take out the spaces, for some reason this dialog box changed everything to pppp without them.) At first glance it looked like a failure, with the sequence stopping in measure 6 rather than at the end of my selection in measure 9. The pp’s mf’s and f were not where I wanted them either. So, to start with, I tried dragging the f over. Bingo! Closer but not good enough. But I was able to drag each of them individually to get them close enough to express my intent, and it looks far better than what I started with.
This is probably because those dynamics are grouped together horizontally (as well as linked together vertically): in your first screenshot you can see that all those dynamics are highlighted (blue) if one of them is selected (orange).
Sometimes to edit complex combined dynamics position semantically (in Write mode) can be useful to temporarily ungroup them (and/or unlink them if you need them to start/end in different places on different staves).
Engrave mode is seldom necessary in such cases (it can be helpful if you need to correct slightly their position graphically).
