What about using Grace notes? You’d have to fake the tie with a slur, though.
I’ve done the final quaver of the cadenza as ‘real’ notes, but changed their size. Hmm: Can’t beam real and grace notes together.
That’s what I did, Ben. The notes up to the C are grace notes and the remainder are resized real notes as a triplet over two quarters. And I did indeed have to fake the tie.
Look. Here’s what I suggested right at the beginning of the thread:
The blue notes are default upstem voice 1.
The red notes are upstem voice 2 and scaled down to grace-size - they’re real notes within tuplets.
I’ve had to use two voices in order to tie from a normal-sized C to a gracenote-sized C - that IS a real tie.
Using two voices means using two separate tuplets in the first half of the bar.
The pause is real, but has been dragged in Engrave mode (in the vocal part only).
I’ve hidden some rests.
There is NO manual note spacing whatsoever.
Since the top image I’ve tweaked the beaming and added the slur.
Here’s what it looks like in Print mode, with all the signposts hidden:
As usual, that’s brilliant, Leo. As usual, I don’t understand it. How do you get an eighth triplet to fit into one eighth note to produce a dotted quarter? Same with the next triplet. Each group of 4 32nds would normally take up an 8th. How do you fit 12 of them into the space of an 8th without turning them into 64ths? Same with the last group. What kind of triplet can fit 24 32nds into a quarter?
They’re all 3:1 tuplets, as should be obvious from the first image.
The first tuplet is three eighths/quavers in the space of one. The second is also three eighths/quavers in the space of one. The third is three quarters/crotchets in the space of one.
I did mention this 24 minutes after your original post 
In case it’s not obvious by this point: Dorico will allow you to put pretty much anything into a tuplet. You can have 27:2 or 3:1 or 64:9, if you really want.
I’m not going to make jokes about musicians who can’t count, but mentally juggling fractions to figure out what tuplets you need is a little bit harder than just counting beats.
But it’s worth learning how to do it for situations like this, even if you “gave up trying to do math” when you were still at school.
These are just two of several unintuitive but useful hacks involving tuplets. Another one is 4:4 (or 1:1, or whatever), which gives you a bracket.
I guess the principle is that tuplets (and the ability to hide their bracket and number) allow you great flexibility in stretching or compressing notes into unexpected groupings.
A tuplet doesn’t have to contain notes that are all the same length. A “triplet of 8th notes” could contain three 8ths, or an 8th and a quarter, or two 8ths and two 16ths, or even twelve 32nd-notes if you want.
A human performer might prefer seeing 12:8 over a group of twelve 32nds rather than 3:2, but if you are going to hide the numbers anyway, it makes no difference.
A humans sight-reader might have to think twice about what a 3:1 tuplet means, but the computer doesn’t care whether the ratio is 3:2, 3:1 or 97:53 - it just does the math.
Sorry for my slowness (Schlepp = nomen est omen!). Finally got it. I’m not used to setting up tuplets the way Dorico does it. One last question and then I can bury this horse. How did you connect the secondary beams in the second triplet? In the properties panel, changing the split secondary beam won’t connect the last (32nd) beam.
That’s what I wasn’t used to!
I think I just selected them and did “Beam Together”. If that doesn’t work then select that group notes and play with the Split Secondary Beam dropdown in the Properties panel.
I’m afraid I’m out for a few hours now without a computer - I’ll double-check the file later if you’ve not figured it out.
Yes, I’d tried that first and it hadn’t worked and my futzing with the secondary beams in the properties panel and contextual menu had screwed things up. All done! On to the next challenge…
You can really just use a single tuplet for the whole bar. A 6:2 quarter tuplet. It all aligns perfectly; no need to hide rests, manually tweak positions, etc. It’s really the same thing pianoleo suggested since the first post. Just decide if you want to deal with beaming or with hiding things.
Josue, not if you want the cadenza cue-sized. To tie the Cs together you need two different voices, which means multiple tuplets. Trust me - I’ve done it!
I changed a couple of other places in the score using this method and avoiding grace notes. Works well, including the use of a second voice, especially since it’s easy to hide the rests. What was tripping me up was the relevance of selecting of a specific note value before invoking the tuplet popup.
I recently transcribed an English horn Concertino (Donizetti) for wind ensemble accompaniment. There were three relatively short cadenzas and one fairly long one. Not having done any before, I had to learn “all things cadenza.”
Long story short, I found no situation in which open meter combined with using forced-duration rests plus hidden rests for the “extras” didn’t work just fine.
The particular examples in this opera (Donizetti) worked best using tuplets, as it was necessary to have certain cadenza notes coincide with rests in the other parts at seemingly impossible moments. I’m looking forward to experimenting with open meter…
Hi all,
This thread has been very helpful quite a few times now. But, try as I may, I can’t seem to get this tiny cadenza right:
The issue is that the beam in the first beat remains normal-sized, while the beam after is quite clearly grace-note-sized. Is there a way to get the first dotted eight to keep the normal-sized beam and the next 32-notes to be grace-note-sized?
(Oh, and unless it isn’t obvious, the meter is 4/8.)
If you need to keep the beams in the first beam group full-sized, then I think your only option is to design a new notehead set in Engrave > Notehead Sets that uses a smaller glyph, then use that notehead set for the two 32nd noteheads in the first beam group.
Hi Daniel! Thanks for your reply. I would like to achieve the opposite, actually: to have only the first note to have a normal beam, and then every note after that to have a scaled-down beam. The issue is that the first note and the second are beamed together, so I’m not sure if there’s a way to do this. So far, I’ve decided to make the first two noted unbeamed and voilà. Problem solved (almost).