Total Dorico newbie. I am trying to inset tuplets between existing notes. I use insert mode, set the duration for the tuplet division and create the tuplet. When I start inputting the note goes before the tuplet, which is wrong. If I shift the caret, I can’t get the first note to go in the tuplet, it goes in the next place.
I know this is miserably confused, and it can’t be that difficult, obviously. What am I missing? Is it something to do with rhythmic grid settings? I have read the manual over and over but I can’t figure it out.
Hard to provide an example project, as this is only my initial ignorance and certainly not Dorico issue.
Well, after all morning experimenting, I found that after using insert mode to put in the tuplet, you have to exit insert mode to get notes in the tuplet placeholder.
Why is that? Am I still doing something wrong? It’s not at all obvious to me why you have to turn off insert mode to get into the tuplet, when you don’t have to do this for entering non-tuplet notes (I think).
I can’t find this in the documentation. Or I am just missing a fundamental design concept? Ten years of engraving complex scores with Lilypond may have fried my brain!
Insert mode pulls and pushes the stuff around the stuff that you’re inputting in order to make room for it. Once you’ve created the tuplet, it contains rests. If you want to overwrite those rests with notes, you need to not be in Insert mode.
Many modern computer keyboards (especially on laptops) lack the “Insert” key, but Dorico’s process here is not dissimilar to the function of the Insert key as used in a word processor. Most word processors insert by default - you put the cursor wherever you want to insert letters or words, type those words and watch the existing following words shunt over to the right. If you toggle off Insert mode, by hitting the Insert button, your word processor will start overtyping the existing letters/words with the new ones you type.
Ah, brilliant @pianoleo . That’s the concept I was missing. My mind did not perceive that I just inserted a set of rests - sometimes one tends to think of rests as blank space (totally wrong, of course). That is what I was not seeing. The good thing about this is that it is totally and utterly logical, like the rest of Dorico (and unlike me).
Not quite sure one can agree with that. I have frequent need of inserting music, rather than only appending. I think the tuplet case here is not entirely obvious to a Dorico beginner like me, but everything else about insert mode seems totally logical.
I’m in complete agreement, LOL! I even removed the shortcut for it so I can’t accidentally enable it. @Andro, the important thing to realize is that insert mode will affect the entire rest of the flow. It doesn’t matter if there are 100 bars rest between the measure you are editing and the next entrance, you have just modified music that isn’t even visible on screen. You have to be super careful with insert and be sure to immediately proofread any music that follows.
Let’s say I already input the music starting at bar 17. I then went back to input the beginning melody, but was going too fast and left out a note. Using Insert to insert that note creates a huge mess later on.
If I was working in Galley view, it’s likely I wouldn’t have even seen the edits to bars 17-19, and by the time I did would have had no idea how they got to be so screwed up. As currently implemented Insert mode is something I only use in rare circumstances and I immediately proofread after.
Agreed. Just push the notes/rests into the first bar with an implicit whole rest. Don’t treat any implicit whole rests like they are explicit and shove all the subsequent music forward. Perhaps another setting would be desirable for editing unmetered music, but I’m pretty sure 99% of users are not going to want bar 17-19 to modified by an action in bar 6 in my example above.
Definitely sounds like a nice idea, but what happens when, eventually, all whole-bar rests are used up? Will the rest of the music start to shift anyway? Or would Dorico have to magically know to stop inserting, that is: keep track of the last insertion limit, even if it is destroyed in the process?
Another approach could be to have the user set a limit first: a kind of barrier beyond which no notes will go. But then again, what if notes shifted forward hit this barrier? Will they vanish in the rift of doom, or will the rest of the music start moving forward after all, with the risk of becoming illegible? Should Dorico maybe insert (whole) bars, to keep things tidy?
I would think pushing music into implicit whole rests would give the desired result the majority of the time in metered music. Once the bars with implicit whole rests are completely filled, then the current behavior could be used. If you know you have to insert quite a large passage, then the user could simply Shift-B some empty bars first if they didn’t want to risk affecting music later in the flow.
