Hello, I am a new Dorico user and have fiddled around and searched around and can’t find how to do this.
I want to place a diamond shaped note symbol with an accidental to a certain position in a bar which does not interfere with the note values or rests in the bar. This is not a played note but is to indicate to the harpist to flick a lever at a particular place.
I understand how to select the notehead but not how to place it without affecting the music in the bar.
I have attached a photo of what I am trying to achieve:
I never saw a pedal change notated this way, I always write them as text above the upper staff.
It isn’t a pedal harp notation it is for a lever harp. With a pedal harp when you make a accidental you change the pitch in every octave but on a lever (Celtic) harp you manually flick a lever in a particular octave so the player needs to know which one to change. You can notate this as text between stages. Something like 3F# but it is much quicker to read if it is shown as a pitch on the stave.
It isn’t a pedal harp notation it is for a lever harp. With a pedal harp when you make an accidental you change the pitch in every octave but on a lever (Celtic) harp you manually flick a lever in a particular octave so the player needs to know which one to change. You can notate this as text between staves. Something like 3F# but it is much quicker to read if it is shown as a pitch on the stave.
Ah, I see. I didn’t know this but have never written for anything else than pedal harp.
You can move notes graphically with the Note Spacing Tool in Engrave Mode.
Please refer to the documentation.
Write the “lever note” as a whole note grace-note. Then change the note head and change the Scale property to “normal” in the properties panel.
If you don’t need to use real grace notes you can change the default size, Go to Engraving Options / Notes / Grace Notes and set the grace note scale factor to 1.
Thank you! I am so new to Dorico, please can I check…so I would input the note as a pitch within the bar and then move it around in engrave. But when I input the pitch, I could do this without changing what is already in the bar? So if I already have 4 crochets in the bar, I could add this extra pitch and move it around without making it a bar of 5 crochets (for example?) when I tried this, it just moved everything along.
No, do what Rob suggests: input the lever note as a grace note, then change its scale using Properties.
Ah ha! This sounds like what I imagined I might have to do! Thank you so much, looking forward to getting home and trying it!
Thanks daniel, many harpists of Facebook who have just started with Dorico like myself are keen to have a nice blog post explaining some of these fiddly bits!