In the final system of the attached document, I am trying to reposition some of the tab notes to create less crowding. I have gone to Engrave > Note Spacing and have successfully repositioned some of the notes on the music stave which were rather crowded. However, I seem unable to be to move any of the tablature notes. There is nothing in the Properties Panel which allows me to do this either. Any ideas? Thanks.
Riffs.dorico (586.6 KB)
At the moment, there’s no way to use the circular handles to adjust the position of numbers in tablature independently of the notes on the notation staff – because they are “the same” notes, there’s a single property value that applies only to the notation at present. This is a bit of an oversight and something we need to address in future.
You’re perhaps forcing a bit too much music onto one system at the moment with your fixed casting off settings. If you’re dead set on forcing four bars per system, you may need to consider a slight reduction of the staff size on the Page Setup page of Layout Options.
Hi Daniel,
Thank you for taking the time to reply.
I realise that I have been rather ambitious in trying to squeeze an almost unreasonable amount of notes onto this stave. However, I was certain that in an earlier version of Dorico it was indeed possible to independently move the notes on the tablature stave, albeit by a rather circuitous route. Maybe I was mistaken. But to my mind it is a major omission. However, I am slightly confused by your statement above - “because they are “the same” notes, there’s a single property value that applies only to the notation at present”. If this is the case, when I move the notes on the music stave, why don’t the notes on the tablature stave move as well? Having independent (or some independent) control of the tablature stave is very, very desirable when it comes to final page tweaks. Finale, for all it’s faults, did allow for extensive control of the tablature stave and I miss having that - it’s about the only thing that I miss though! It would be great if this could be implemented at some point though. Thanks again.
You can do this with Voice column X offset property in Engrave mode.
That is a great help - thank you for the tip. Although I probably have too many notes on this stave I can at least make it more understandable now!
As you said, it seems unnatural that we can’t move the tab number at all in Note-Spacing mode. I hope this will be possible in the future.