Fair warning: This is gonna be a decently long post!
I was talking to a friend earlier today about Dorico and Tantacrul’s (wait before you get your pitchforks out!) YouTube review came up. I told them the usual, “yeah, it’s pretty hilarious, but keep in mind he did miss a few key features like the caret, blah blah blah”, but I decided to dig into how Tantacrul could have done things differently to demo Dorico for my friend.
I brought up Tantacrul’s section about Force Duration and spectral music (Music Software & Interface Design: Steinberg's Dorico - YouTube) and realized I’d never tried the example provided in the video myself. Going off on my intuition that Force Duration can be toggled during Note Input and Force Duration can be copy-and-pasted, I started working out the notes Tantacrul wrote in his video with Force Duration enabled during Note Input… but I ran into a lot of problems.
EXAMPLE 1
To start out, I wanted to do the first two tied half notes in the excerpt. What I was looking for was this:
The first thing I tried was tying a dotted whole to a half, but Dorico kept forgetting the forced duration:
I really didn’t understand what was going on; when I checked the two notes I wrote after exiting Note Input, I noticed the Force Duration toggle for either note didn’t save:
So… I suppose Force Duration wasn’t being applied to the entire tie chain with the whole and half notes…? I tried tying a whole to a half to another half, which actually worked:
EXAMPLE 2
Next, I tried to write the entire first system from the video, which should look like this:
I was able to do that outside of Note Input like this:
Okay, this made sense to me, but from the start of doing this exercise in Dorico, I wanted to see if I was able to do everything in Note Input mode. I couldn’t get my first attempt using only Note Input for this one to work at all:
I was really stumped by this, because when I checked the notes outside of Note Input, both had Force Duration still active, unlike Example 1:
Again, I tried the same strategy from Example 1, which was to avoid using any notes that crossed bar lines and formed tie chains. This worked again:
So based on these last two examples, notes that create tie chains in Note Input mode will cancel out Force Duration…? This doesn’t sound right to me, so please correct me if I’m wrong. If this is the case, I would hope the Dorico team could make Force Duration more lenient in the future.
EXAMPLE 3
Now finally, I wanted to see how fast I could offset the dynamics Tantacrul was working on by copy-and-pasting this example by either a) moving the caret to the next beat, and/or b) using keyboard shortcuts to shift the phrase over by one beat. Unfortunately, neither worked.
What I wanted to see was this:
When I tried both methods a) and b) from above, Force Duration kept getting canceled out:
Here’s one final GIF of what I tried:
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So, to wrap up… I thought I understood how Dorico handled notes with Force Duration before today, but now I’m admittedly feeling lost. It seems like Note Input mode is a little more restricted than how I learned it at first? I mean… am I doing something wrong here or missing something obvious? I’d like to make sure I have a solid understanding of how Dorico handles notation before making any confident suggestions. Thanks for reading!!
I suppose I was wondering if it could’ve been done even faster without using U.