Horizontal offset of notes on divisi stave

Hi everyone,

after reading along silently for quite some time now, I finally started working on a bigger project with Dorico (4). While for most of my problems I found the solutions in the manual or this forum, I have some issues now, that I could not resolve. Therefore, I might start a few more threads within the next time ;-). I hope that’s fine.

Regarding my first question: I have a situation with violin divisi/condensing, where Vls are split into three staves (see pictures). I changed the notehead reflecting the length of the open meter ‘bar’. However, obviously the single notes are hard to identify. Therefore I tried to use the Offset-parameter (Versatz in the German version). You can see I entered 10 for the selected note, but nothing happens. Is this expected behaviour? And if yes - why is the feature available if it does nothing in this situation?

image

image

Thanks
Daniel

Indeed the Offset does nothing for notes, why it’s still accessible I’m not sure. You could experiment, however, with the Voice column index (DE: Stimmspaltenindex) property, which only shows up in Engrave mode.

Also, you may have already noticed that Condensing doesn’t always play nice with graphic items like the extender lines in this screenshot. I don’t know the rest of the context of course but maybe you should ignore the divisi/condensing functionality for this section and just input three notes (with extenders) in one staff.

Hmm, too bad, but I guess not using the divisi feature here might be a feasible solution (also, as you have noticed, then I can get the lines to show up).

I tried the voice column index option, with strange results: I can activate the toggle switch for all three notes, but as soon as I change the 0 to a different number for one of the notes, the toggle gets switched off for the other ones…

What I do in this situation (for organ music) is to change the middle note to a different voice.

Screenshot

Once you’ve done that, you can use Note Spacing in Engrave mode to adjust the position.

Screenshot

… giving you a result similar to how breves would be offset in 16th/17th century:

Screenshot

Whether this would work for divisi/condensing, I don’t know. But can I clarify? You’re creating Divisi to get 3 separate staves in the parts, but Condensing them to get one staff in the score?

Probably it only works when the condensing decides it needs a second voice, which not the case here with the rhythmic unison.

Using a different voice sounds like a good idea, I will try it. Meanwhile, entering the notes as a chord in a non-divisi stave did not help, because I still did not find a way to shift one of them.

Yes, I want them separated in the part - there are situations in this piece where the voices are actually moving rather than just holding a chord ;-). I think splitting them makes the reading easier for the players and so it would be more consistent to always split them.

Using one stave and a second voice did the trick. Thanks!