In Sibelius, lines are defined in a single staff, and while you can drag the end of a line across another staff, playback does not work for lines like arpeggios and glisses across staves.
How will these work in Dorico? Can cross-staff lines be defined without dragging, and will playback work?
Any chance of having magnetic glisses, comparable to Sibelius’ magnetic slurs? that will adjust when pitches changed? Can such lines be attached to notes rather than rhythmic positions in bars?
Harp gliss playback in Sibelius is particularly problematic. By default the best you can do is White Notes, which works only in C major and its modes. We make do with plugins or adding hidden notes in unused voices. It would be nice to have at least a “diatonic” option that would take pitches from the current key signature, but that is often not adequate. You might have no key signature or you might be modulating. A harp glissando really needs a way to specify or determine the current harp tuning.
Granted there are not all that many harpists using notation software, but harps show up in orchestral scores. Will Dorico handle playback of these any better than other software? Since there will not be plugins for the immediate present, it would be nice to have some way to get them to work, other than the hidden notes option.
The starting point for Dorico is pretty much “leave your guns, knives, and assumptions about how Sibelius or Finale works at the door” When a notation program lets you insert arbitrary notes into a score anywhere you like, even if that involves pushing an existing tuplet part way over a barline and automatically splitting it into two separate tuplets with the correct notation, “rhythmic positions in bars” isn’t a very useful way to think about defining the input…
Possibly the “ultimate” playback option would be to use a VST instrument like Harps Sound Library - Garritan. The Dorico playback system will be basically a subset of Cubase and controlled pretty much the same way - e.g. you can create (and share with other users) the Cubase equivalent of Sibelius sound sets, to define the playback for the notations in the score.
AFAIK the Garritan harp glissandos interact with the harp pedal settings in the same way as a real harp, and Garritan provides presets for things like diminished 7th chord glisses, etc.
What harp playback will be included “straight out of the box” in Dorico, I have no idea.
Hopefully pretty simply: select the two notes you want to be joined by a gliss. line, whatever staves they happen to be on, and click the gliss. line button in the Ornaments panel on the right-hand side in Write mode, and that’s it. They attach to notes in different voices and on different staves quite happily, and update as the pitches change, plus they intelligently avoid accidentals, etc.
Playback at the moment is a bit more of an unknown quantity. It’s quite possible that glissando lines will not produce any playback to speak of in the first version of Dorico, but you can expect us to iterate on adding playback features as quickly as we can after the initial release.
The real question Daniel, that applies to embellishments as well, is the following: is it possible to have a playback (actual MIDI notes) different from what is displayed? As, for instance, in the Display Quantize of Cubase Score? Or it’s necessary to have notes with zero velocity and hidden notes with the right velocity, to get what is needed?
It will be good to be able to attach such lines without having to drag them into place.
Rob indicates that playback could be handled by the called library, but I would be interested to see what will happen with Dorico as it ships, for harps in particular, since I would imagine there would need to be a way to allow the tuning to be given to the playback engine. Guess I will wait and see.
I’m afraid there’s no update on glissando playback just yet, Anders. It remains on our backlog with a number of other similar sorts of things, including trills, ornaments, pauses, and so on.
Looking through this thread in order to locate a solution for indicating a gliss or “fall off” in Dorico.
My scenario: a jazz piece where on the last note of the piece all players do a “fall off”.
The problem: typically I would notate this with either a wavy or non-wavy glissando, but it seems that Dorico requires a source note and a destination note, and since there are no notes after the final note (only a rest with a fermata), Dorico doesn’t seem to want to attach a glissando to the final note.
Am I missing some simple solution? Is there a way to address this?
You can create an additional voice, place the note low under the final rest/fermata for each instrument, create a glass from the final note(s) to the newly created voice, then adjust the color of that unwanted note by changing the alpha channel to 0. This will turn that fake note invisible. I have successfully attached glisses to invisible notes no problem.
When a notation program lets you insert arbitrary notes into a score anywhere you like, even if that involves pushing an existing tuplet part way over a barline and automatically splitting it into two separate tuplets with the correct notation, “rhythmic positions in bars” isn’t a very useful way to think about defining the input…