Admittedly, Dorico handles so many things with ease and fluidity. The tie situation is driving me nuts. IMO, during the writing process, the beauty of being the writer is that I should be able to select notes and make modifications no matter where the ties are, and that I should be able to make modifications to notes within a tied region.
If I want the 2nd tied note on the downbeat to be a whole note, thus nudging the last 8th note out of the 2nd bar, do I really have to untie and retie these notes, or is there some other way?
The musical math would say I want to change a “whole note that starts on the & of 4” (that should be a clue that this tie thing is crazy), to a whole note + an 1/8th note which would extend it through the 2nd bar.
I want to embrace this, but it’s really the only cumbersome thing about Dorico, that I would have to untie these notes (from top to bottom in the score), then make the rhythmic change, then re-tie them again, right?
Help me learn to embrace this, because right now it’s got me !
Okay, this is what I’m talking about. Thank you so much! I still like the idea of the writer being able to cherry pick notes from the page during the writing process. Not during engraving of course, but this helps for sure.
Can I try another scenario and see if you’ve got the solution without needing to untie and tie the notes, or maybe the quickest way to do this? Using the same music as an example (which isn’t the best for this, but it’s consistent with the frustrating thing I’m running into), let’s say I wanted another section to play just a dotted quarter 8th in the 2nd bar. In Sibelius, you could select both notes and option click to their new destination but of course both of these notes are bound to the tie. It would be easiest to just freshly notate the music in the other instrument I’m sure, but for more complicated passages, selecting specific notes would be ideal. What I would do in Dorico is copy the whole passage, then untie and remove the unwanted notes to get to this. Is there another way or do I just need to keep coming around to the Dorico Tie Way? Thanks so much!
Dorico doesn’t think of the tied notes as separate entities — it is just one note with the given amount of rhythmic time. So instead of an eighth tied to a whole note, it’s a note that is 4.5 beats. That is why you cannot select part of it.
A workaround is to make (in this case) a dotted quarter followed by an eighth, select and copy to the clipboard (ctrl/cmd C) then make the eighth whatever lenghth you wanted as described earlier. You can paste the copied dotted quarter – eighth combination wherever you want.
— Jim
I’m not sure I’m quite following what you are trying to do, but as mentioned above, to Dorico it’s just one note duration. Get familiar with the shortcuts to change the note values and positioning: Alt/Opt+Shift+arrow to change the values, Alt/Opt+arrow to change the location. Here’s a gif where I’m changing the note values and moving it around, all without bothering with any ties:
You might also appreciate the ability to ‘cut’ ties.
Start note entry (display the caret), move to where you want a tie to break (you may need to adjust the rhythmic grid to get the resolution you want) , and hit u. The tied note will split into two notes.
Welcome to the forum. I’m not sure I understand.
Normally, I would expect a tie to be closer to the notehead than a tuplet numeral. Do you mean slurs? Can you describe (or show an image) of exactly what you’re trying to achieve?
As for your second question, Dorico can’t yet do ties to 2nd endings, so there will be some playback effect of the note restarting.
! 
I still like the idea of the writer being able to cherry pick notes from the page during the writing process. Not during engraving of course, but this helps for sure.
