Hi everybody. Any ideas for how I can create this sort of notation? (It’s a glissando lasting the entire bar, ending at specified pitches, notated as grace notes.)
Thanks for any suggestions!
Jeff
Hi Jeff.
This kind of notation requires a little bit of tweaking, especially on the top staff. (1) Input the last notes as last quavers of the bar, (2) remove the rests before them, (3) hide the stems (property in Engrave mode) and select source and target note, (4) shift-O “gliss” (or use the appropriate panel, but that’s not really the Dorico way, is it?) (5) Change gliss to gl. in the appropriate property panel field. Wait. No, that’s not possible. You’ll have to cope with gliss., port., no text — or write something with shift-x, but it won’t be slanted.
At this point, it should look almost as you wish. (6) Use shift-x to input parenthesis (with avoid collisions disabled in Engrave mode properties). (7) Use the Note spacing sub-mode in Engrave mode to move things horizontally as you wish and you’re set to go. I’d rather do that in the last steps of the engraving process, as you’ll know then how much horizontal space you posess for that bar.
Hope it helps !
I would suggest this approach:
- Make sure you are in Write mode.
- Input whole notes in bottom staff.
- Input grace notes in bottom staff and change grace note type to unslashed in the “Grace Notes” section of the properties panel. Also put them before the barline.
- Cross staff (yes, it’s a verb) the grace notes to the upper staff by selecting them and press m.
- Add two glissandi to the whole notes (yes, we will adjust them later).
- Create a text object at the start of the next bar by pressing shift+x and write “( )” in it. Also adjust the font size to something apropriate.
- Go into Engrave mode.
- Select the grace notes and remove the stem by ticking the “Hide stem” option in the “Notes and Rests” section of the properties panel.
- Select the text object and untick the “Avoid collisions” option in the “Text” section of the properties panel.
- Move the text object so the parenthesis encompasses the grace notes.
- Adjust the glissando lines by selecting them and drag the end handles to apropriate positions.
Unless you care about the hassle of change the “gliss.” text to “gl.”, consider yourself done!
Thank you both! I tried both of your methods, and it’s very interesting to compare them. Frigolito’s method with grace notes on the following downbeat (moved “before barline”) seems to work particularly well here. The grace notes don’t break multibar rests, and they remain consistently at the end of the measure. My “( )” Shift-X object floats around the notes if I attach it to the last 32nd of the bar, and also works if I paste it in a different measure. Thanks! (And luckily I don’t care about gl. vs. gliss.!)
Reviving an old thread now that Dorico 3 supports such beautiful playback of glissandi — and I’m again working on engraving some finicky harp notation (see screenshot). It appears that Dorico has two slightly strange limitations:
- Dorico won’t play back a glissando that ends on a grace note—if the final note is a grace note, the gliss. doesn’t play back at all
- Dorico requires that the first note of a gliss. end before the final note—trying to add a gliss. to a measure like this screenshot just silently does nothing, which is super strange…
Any ideas about best practices for a measure like this, especially one that has to play back? I’m thinking at the moment I need to use a half note and change the note head shape to a whole, but it’s super inelegant.
Dorico requires that the last note of the glissando is after the first note of the glissando. I don’t think that’s unreasonable! You can indeed use the kind of approach you outline to circumvent this.
Such things are all over the place in the last movement of Mahler IX – written over a century ago!
David
David, your example is possible without any workarounds (because the grace note is attached to the downbeat following the next barline).
Sorry to be obtuse, but as I mentioned in my message when I create a glissando to a grace note there is no playback. Daniel, what’s the trick for getting playback?
I can verify that there is no playback for a gliss to a grace note; but for me this is academic, since I do not notate (harp) gissandi that way and would probably notate differently for guitar too.
There’s no trick for getting playback from a rhythmic note to a grace note. You’ll need to use a rhythmic note at both ends of the glissando. You can of course change the scale of a rhythmic note so that it has the same size and appearance as a grace note.
Could I request playback of glissandi from rhythmic notes to grace notes in a future version, please? At the moment, getting this measure to display and play back requires a bunch of workarounds, and it really seems like perfectly reasonable notation… I normally don’t care about playback, but this one bugs me. Grace notes are notes too! 
You can request it, but it’s not going to be something we will have time to work on any time soon.