This is for a project where one movement has an approximate tempo of quarter note = 40 and another movement has an approximate tempo of quarter note = 264. I’d like all the grace notes in the project to last approximately 50 ms, which is a relatively normal acacciatura note speed in performance. However, the only way to set a grace note speed appears to be “relative to a quarter note at 120 bpm” and obviously the values that produce the correct results for both movements are very different (respectively about 0.06 and 0.33). There’s also no way I can find to set different playback options per flow. Is there an option I’m missing somewhere that solves this problem?
Sadly its a global setting. I can’t accept this musically, for exactly the reasons you have mentioned.
Also, @Lillie_Harris suggested I could set a tempo on a run of unslashed grace notes to set a desired speed but it appears there is a bug in Dorico which messes up the following tempo and does not do the speed indicated for the graces.
I do not know the current status but I hope this has been registered as a bug in the defect list. See here:
You will find the discussion of grace note speed inside this topic, with my minimal working example that shows the issue.
(That suggestion was perhaps – read, almost definitely – over-hasty as I hadn’t double-checked my memory of this area of playback. So I’m not sure it’s a bug so much as just an error on my part!)
Whether classified as a bug or not, it sure messes with the following tempo. Can’t be right. A corner case maybe, but Dorico is zealous about protecting one from mistakes, so perhaps it should bar the setting of a tempo on grace notes. I do think there is a problem here - because it is not clear that one cannot set a tempo on grace notes.
The way that the default grace note length is set in Playback Options>Timing is quite confusing. It is specified as the “Fraction of quarter note at 120 bpm.” At a tempo of q=120, each quarter note lasts 1/2 second, so the default grace note length could be specified as the “Fraction of 1/2 second.”
If you want each grace note to last approximately 50 ms regardless of the current tempo, then set the default grace note length to 1/10, because 1/10 of 1/2 second is 50 ms.
Consider the following example, where all of the playback options are set to the factory defaults except for the default grace note length, which is set to 1/10:
By examining the MIDI file exported from this example, the first grace note lasts 16 ticks and the second one lasts 105 ticks, and Dorico uses 480 ticks per quarter note. At a tempo of q=40, each quarter note lasts 1500 ms, so the first grace note lasts 16/480 of 1500 ms, which is 50 ms. At a tempo of q=264, each quarter note lasts 227.272 ms, so the second grace note lasts 105/480 of 227.272 ms, which is approximately 49.7 ms.
That’s simply not happening in the file I’m working on. When I set the grace note length to 1/10, all grace notes in the flow with an initial tempo of eighth note = 88 play back slightly slower than triplet 32nds—i.e., not fast enough to sound like an ornament at all. By comparison, all grace notes in the flow with an initial tempo of half note = 132 are simply inaudible.
(From this perspective, since the movement with eighth = 88 contains most of the grace notes, arpeggios and tremolos in the piece, it’s easiest to set the global length for all these things to 1/16, even though this makes them useless in the remaining flows. Yes, should have mentioned that arpeggios and tremolos have the same problem.)
Was this a bug or other known issue that was fixed in Dorico 4 by any chance? (I’m still running 3.5, and probably won’t upgrade to 4 unless a future 4 update includes the rebuilt condensing/divisi system or some other such feature I’d find useful.)
In your initial post, you only mentioned tempos with a quarter note as the beat unit. The reason the grace notes don’t have the length you want is because you are encountering a bug when using tempos which do not use a quarter note as the beat unit. At a tempo of e=88, the grace notes last about twice as long as they do at a tempo of q=44. At a tempo of h=132, the grace notes last about half as long as they do at a tempo of q=264.
To solve this problem, you could use tempos with a quarter note as the beat unit and hide them. Then display the tempos the way you want using system-attached text, possibly with the help of a font like MusGlyphs.
Interesting. This seems to have worked. I would have never guessed, and agree that it’s quite unintuitive (and requires hidden tempo markings), so perhaps this is something to simplify in a future update.
I can imagine it would also be quite a pain to come up with the correct quarter note conversion for cases where the tempo follows the dotted eighth or dotted sixteenth etc.
Converting tempos to use a quarter note as the beat unit doesn’t have to be difficult. The duration of a dotted eighth is 3/4 of the duration of a quarter note, so a tempo of dotted eighth = n is equivalent to a tempo of quarter note = 3n/4. Similarly, the duration of a dotted sixteenth is 3/8 of the duration of a quarter note, so a tempo of dotted sixteenth = n is equivalent to a tempo of quarter note = 3n/8.
I’d forgotten about this bug which surely explains some of the strange behaviour I’ve found in a recent project with grace notes. Thanks for the timely reminder.
