I’ve just taken up the Finale to Dorico offer and sat down today for a fiddle after watching the John Barron video. Using the demo piece ‘Iconica Trailer’ I tried changing the beam options to match what I use in Finale, and even described in the Dorico settings as ‘Ted Ross’, but with condensed parts the results are wrong/inconsistent. Imaged attached, the top staff does NOT straddle the staff line as it should, whilst the bottom staff does. It appears that you can’t edit beams in condensed parts - seems very restrictive if so. Any help appreciated.
Welcome to the forum.
If you mean manual editing, you can indeed. Switch to Engrave mode, make sure that Graphic editing is on, select the beam and use mouse or cursor keys woth modifiers to move it.
And this is the Graphic editing icon –
Thanks for your reply - I can edit in engraver mode. However, I just realised the problem is actually not the condensed parts, but the fact even flute 2 on its own doesn’t have the beam in the correct position (must be to do with the bottom staff line). Having to manually edit all of these will be a real pain. In addition, if I edit the beam in the single part first, this isn’t reflected in the condensed score, so I would need to edit twice! I’m assuming this is a bug then, otherwise a complete oversight…
This has to do with the nature of the condensing feature. I am pleased with my beam settings, but slurs for two condensing flutes for instance have to be edited in all three places; condensed score, flute part 1, flute part 2. One gets used to it.
Yes, it is intentional that graphical edits made to the uncondensed material are not carried through to the condensed material, so that you can handle them independently if required. However, we know it would sometimes be useful to be able to tell Dorico to propagate properties from the uncondensed to condensed material, and this is something we are considering adding in future.
There are further settings related to stem lengths on the Notes page of Engraving Options that you should investigate in order to influence how Dorico vertically snaps beams to valid positions.
Thanks Daniel - I managed to fix that example by extending the stem shortening settings by 1 each way. However, I can’t for the life of my understand why my quavers on the 2nd or
3rd space aren’t having stems shortened when the setting is clearly turned on. This is going to do my head in!
Beaming is a huge mess of interrelated settings, so it’s hard to know exactly what to change. If you are looking for Ross-style beams by default, it is possible to get fairly close, but not exact. (At least I never quite got there.) I believe my defaults with your example are all correct though according to Ross, so there are settings that can be improved. All of the below are unedited and are just using my own defaults:
Condensing on
Condensing off
The factory shortened stem lengths are much longer than what Ross prescribes. The shortened stem length for eighths in the factory settings is 3 spaces which is way too long IMO. Beams / Snap to line positions also comes into play. There was a longish thread over on Notat.io where a several of us were comparing our Dorico beam settings and I posted most of mine.
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Thanks Fred - you are correct it is a huge mess of interrelated settings. I managed to fix my 2nd/3rd space stem length issue by changing ‘flat quaver beams with INNER note closer to the beam…’ to ‘Allow stem shortening’ even though my example doesn’t have an inner note.
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Yeah, I have that one checked in my defaults too.