Is there any way to create a keybinding for playing techniques, or at least specially for Pedal lines?
Sort of.
There isn’t a key command available for Add Pedal Line (or start pedal line), but if you search the Preferences > Key Commands dialog you’ll find options for “Stop Pedal Line” and “Add retake”.
Yeah, that doesn’t help me much though. I want to select the stard and end points and add the whole thing in one go, but without having to go hunting in the playing techniques panel.
This is currently one of my biggest pet peeves with Dorico. Any icon I can click in the panels should be keybindable.
Type Shift+P Ped Enter. Doesn’t take any hunting whatsoever.
And if you insist on using a keyboard shortcut then you can always use an external macro creator (such as AutoHotKey on Windows or Keyboard Maestro on mac).
Compared to what other current software? Dorico is pretty much the top of the heap regarding native keybinding options, no?
In Sibelius you can keybind anything that appears anywhere in the ribbon, including all line and text styles, as well as many things that aren’t even buttons (you can keybind specific zoom levels, clefs, or tuplet types, for instance).
Dorico lags here.
Ah, I wasn’t aware of that. Finale’s functionality here is limited, and I mistakenly thought Sibelius was similar. The dev direction is certainly positive though; new keybindings are added with every update.
I’d argue that even without a Pedal shortcut, Dorico’s way of pedalling a page of piano music is way quicker than Sibelius’s.
In Dorico, if you’ve got a page where the pedal line is continuous but retakes every bar/halfbar/two bars, you select the whole page, type Shift+P ped Enter, and then go back and add notches where you want them (either by typing Shift+P ^ Enter or by using a custom key command).
With Sibelius you don’t have notches; you have things that look like this:
You have to start with a “Pedal Lift”, for the first bar, then add a “Pedal Lift Again” to the second bar, and another for the third bar, and then you realise that they’ve not quite vertically aligned correctly so you have to go and align them. Then five minutes later you realise that your casting off (system breaks) have to change, and suddenly you’ve got a situation like this :
Although you can’t create a key command directly for Ped. or indeed any other specific playing technique, you could certainly use an application like Auto HotKey (Windows) or Keyboard Maestro (Mac) to bind a keyboard shortcut to a little macro that performs the sequence Shift+P ped Return Return.
maybe there’s a way to add the Keycommand manually into the keycommands.json (like the little tripplets-input hack) until more keycommands are implemented? I tried with “NoteInput.PedalLineStart” (because the editable counterpart is called “NoteInput.PedalLineStop”) - but without any luck.
In general I’d agree that it would be great to add the possibility to add more custom keycommands. I miss creating barline repeats or certain playing techniques (like upbow/downbow) I constantly use. Or maybe there could be a list of the commands that should be added to the keycommands.json - for the nerds…
Dear Jeff,
I see that you (too) could use the Streamdeck ! All those features are assigned to a (physical) button, with a nice icon on it…
FWIW it is possible to write software that can use multiple standard USB keyboards, and know which one was used. Some multi-player computer games have this (and the same capability with multiple mice) built into the game, so each player can have their own keyboard and mouse.
That could be a cheaper way to get another 100 “programmable function keys” than buying a Stream Deck, if somebody has the time and inclination to write an app. The cheapest keyboards are a tenth of the price of the stream deck hardware!
Dear Rob,
You are right, but to the cheap price of the usb keyboard, you should add the price of the license of AHK or Keyboard maestro. And if you need to move with your set, the Streamdeck is really small and easy to pack 
Granted, it’s not the cheapest solution, but it’s efficient and delivers
AutoHotKey is free
Does AutoHotKey or Keyboard maestro work with TWO keyboards attached to a (desktop) PC? One acting as a normal keyboard, and the other as shortcut keys or triggers for macros without any need to press Ctrl, Alt, etc? If it can listen to more than one keyboard, can it tell which keyboard you pressed a key on?
I guess my previous post wasn’t clear about what I meant…
Certainly not easily, Rob.
AutoHotKey is free >
Keyboard Maestro is not !
I can recommend the razor orbweaver. Pricey, but tremendous helpful and a real time-saver.
But to topic: As someone who is used to work 90% with keyboard and keybindings I also look around for any shortcut I can find in Dorico. But quite often there is none, unfortunatelly. Especially in layout issues. F.i. at the moment I work at an old sibelius-score via XML import. Im forced to manually set up every single hairpin to the bar end. Click-Click-Click (and, depending in which mode I am, looking around for the corresponding option). Thats just annoying. What if I could mark the hairpin(s), press a button and the hairpin(s) would all adjust whereever I want to have them? Programming macros is the only way to achieve fast often used expressions like espressivo or dolce in Dorico. But there are also borders. F.i. that I have to set the “macro-text” manually under the line (click, click, looking around, click) (in case of expression texts, because there’s no option placing free-text styles under the line per default like it is possible for technique-text - but technique text isn’t possible to bind on a macro… This is a vicious circle )
If anyone knows a workaround binding technique text on a macro - please let me know.
Well - in this moment I found the Shift-P option. Head-Table. Don’t let me know please - found it myself. You just have to ask sometimes…
Why not select all, filter gradual dynamics (Edit menu), then set the Barline Interaction property on all of them? If they don’t end near a barline, the property doesn’t do anything.
Sure, that takes a few “clicks”, but you don’t have to adjust one hairpin at a time.
For the text positioning, I’m not sure exactly what you want to do (I know what expression and technique text are in Sibelius, but Dorico isn’t structured the same way) but have you found what the new F shortcut does in 2.2.10?