For my acappella group, there’s a tenor lead that I wrote in the bass clef that’s up 8… The playback sound from Halion is trumpet, and it doesn’t play up the octave. In order to export an mp3 of all the parts with the lead up the octave, I manually raised that staff up an octave (easy to do), but still, it would be nice to have the playback recognize the correct octave. Any easy way to do this?
There is a global setting for this, I believe it’s in Notation options.
See here:
Hi Daniel -
Thanks for the response. But I may have described my problem inaccurately because the solution doesn’t work. (We are an acappella doo-wop group.)
Here’s what I want to achieve for the tenor lead (the song is Papa Oom Mow Mow). His lowest note is E one ledger line below the staff, and he wants to sing the whole part up an octave. The part goes very high up above the staff because there’s falsetto, so I can’t just move the notes up. I provide practice mp3s for all parts, and he wants to hear it up an octave from where it’s written. I used the bass clef with the little 8 on top to indicate it’s sung up an octave, but the mp3 doesn’t recognize that. I tried respecting the octave indicator as you suggested, but that wrote the music down an octave. I tried doing the other symbol (I don’t know what it’s called) that shows you’re supposed to play up 8, but that didn’t affect the exported sound either.
It may not be relevant, but I assign the tenor lead the trumpet sound so it’s easily distinguishable from the back-up vocalists (I assign them a piano sound).
It totally works for me to just select that staff to the end of the flow and raise all the notes with option-command-up arrow and making his mp3 with that, but I thought there might be a different way.
As you can tell, I’m an amateur, but Dorico has been working beautifully for me. I love working with it. (I changed from Sibelius, and now have gone from Dorico 3 to 4; thanks for making all this affordable, since my needs are so limited).
- Annie
Quick 'n dirty solution. Select all your tenor lead. Add an 8ve line. Do your audio export. Delete the 8ve line.
Alternative, you could transpose the Trumpet up and octave in Halion SE.
Try creating a new Piccolo instrument - rename it, change the clef, move your music onto this stave - This will automatically sound 1 octave higher than the written pitch. Make sure ‘Show note colours out of range’ is off!
That won’t work. After inserting the Octave line, one needs to transpose everything by an octave still.
What’s wrong with using an 8va-Clef with the Notation Option, @AnnieK ? Everything is shifted down an octave, so just shift it up again? Then it looks like a normal treble clef, but the 8 indicates it should be an octave higher and playback respects that, too.
You’re right of course - I forgot that Dorico adjusts. My initial thought was select notes. Shift-I 8… Should have gone with that! Underlying my approach is that for audio, the prettiness (or correctness) of the notation does not matter.
Thanks for the interesting suggestions, everyone. I’ll play around with this for the next couple of days.
Don’t forget that you can change the Octave Shift of any given clef in the Properties panel.
1 Like
Janus gave me a lead that worked! So satisfying. (some of the others may have worked as well, but I stopped there). Here’s how I got the tenor lead trumpet sound to permanently play up an octave from what’s written for that song. The bass clef up 8 is still in the sheet music so the singer knows to do that. Thanks, everyone.
- In play mode, select the lead
- Click on the “routing” drop-down menu
- Click on the funny e for “edit instrument”
- There’s a dial labeled “Octave.” Double click on the rectangle under it and enter the number 1 to go up one octave. (If someone wants to go down an octave from what’s written, I think that would be minus 1).
1 Like
The alternative worked once I figured out how to do it. Thanks, Janus!
Hi. Just popping in to share first thanks for pointing out how to fix this, and then also to leave the thought that to me it’s strange that ignoring the 8 marking on a bass clef is the default.
I mean, if someone wants it to be ignored, they may as well just use the common bass clef or look up the setting to ignore it.
Welcome to the forum, Martine! Allow me to quote myself from 2016:
Hi, Mark. It looks like a topic that brings up opinion polarities.
From the former context, it is clear that Dorico is doing this; it is also clear that not everyone agrees with this being a default. Also, from my perspective, it is the first time I am met with that opinion. While one may elect to acknowledge people think so, they don’t have to adopt it. That is also important to acknowledge.
I didn’t mean to direct you to all the controversy in that old thread; merely my explanation of the difference. At least now Dorico offers 3 different ways to adjust the octave of clefs!
As said, ottava markings are frequently absent from the staves of Contrabass, Piccolo, and sometimes even Tenors – so it’s not that the markings on the clefs are ignored, but that their use is optional, as the octave shift is usually implied by the instrument itself.
So, in a sense, having the 8 symbol or not makes no difference. That was the original design.
But as Mark says, now there is sufficient flexibility to look at it whichever way round you like!
Hi, Ben.
“Ignored/Respect” is the terminology Dorico used. And, I like how they put it.
For more context, let’s say I’ve encountered this while doing my first Dorico project, to transplant one Organ work from Finale to Dorico. If some magic was expected to pick up that the last staff with bass 8 clef was pedal, that didn’t really happen. Then, there is that option to save the day. Well, the more I use Dorico, the more I like it. But it has a thick learning curve and does broaden the awareness that there are people who take music notation far differently.
Anyhoo, I am getting a warning from the system that this topic has been solved, so let’s take any further off-topic-key extension to … where it should go. I am a new user, so happy to take a pointer where that would be. 