Dorico’s solution will work the other way: you will enter the music for each player independently, and then Dorico will show it on a combined staff (or staves, depending on the number of instruments and the complexity of the music). So for choral music you would enter the soprano music and lyrics as usual, and the alto music and lyrics as usual, and Dorico would then show it to you on a combined staff, with only a single set of lyrics where possible.
Is there any way it could understand where, say, S and A lyrical rhythms diverge and auto put S above the staff?
Will it take a worst-case view of things like the extender lines, so that, if they’re needed in A but not S, Dorico would know to show them?
It’s impossible to say until we actually get into the implementation, but obviously my hope would indeed be that it could automatically place soprano lyrics above the staff only when needed.
Thanks Daniel. I’ve no doubt it will be a massive time saver.
I’m grateful for this older post, because I also frequently deal with the 2 staff, SATB Choir Reduction scores often used for church music. Slurred or tied voices moving in separate rhythm from the Soprano may require Lyric Extension lines, and while attaching lyric syllables to the Alto voice may work in some cases, it doesn’t address the issue of needing to add extenders where only the Tenor or Bass voice move independently. There may also be circumstances when creating multiple parts where the syllables all need to be attached to a particular voice to create a Melody-Lyrics part. Fortunately, dspreadbury, your workaround does accomplish what’s needed (entering extra rhythmic notes into the Soprano, attaching lyrics and then creating the needed extenders, deleting or combining those extra notes so the Soprano part appears as intended) and this once again shows wonderful intuitive foresight of your development team– making the extenders ’sticky’ to remain even when the note values they’re attached to may change. I do sincerely marvel at how much you’ve managed to address in the program up to this point.
While this method works and it wasn’t an issue being addressed when the original post was written, it is one of those repetitive tasks that might be made less time consuming and less difficult at some point– entering notes that we know are later going to be deleted and then having to select extender handles in Engrave Mode to shorten, either numerically or by dragging, that seems a process that is not as efficient as it might be. (The attached file illustrates the pitfalls.)
Lyric Extenders.dorico (1.2 MB)
So when it is time to implement some tools to deal with this, I might make a suggestion that these capabilities be added– When ANY syllable is selected, possibly add a checkbox option in the Lower Zone to Add Lyric Extension Handles. Both the Start and End X values could be set to 0 (zero) so that no extender displays initially, (unless edited) but the end handle could be dragged or numerically adjusted to make an extender appear. This needn’t disrupt the wonderful ability of Dorico to automatically create Lyric Extenders. Second, when extenders belonging to multiple verses are simultaneously selected, if there was a checkbox to right-justify the end point of those extenders (or automatically snap their length to the nearest grid duration– although I suspect that would require more extensive programming) then it would quickly solve the issue of having to visually align any extenders not automatically generated by the program itself. Your team may have much more elegant ways of addressing this, and meanwhile I’m grateful for the amazing capabilities we currently have.
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Your editing and explanations are meticulous and thorough. But you are missing a couple of features that actually make these engrave mode adjustments unnecessary:
- Once a syllable has a duration, it can be altered with Shift+Alt+arrows by the grid so the extender is exactly the correct duration to accommodate all the parts
- If you prefer melismatic syllables left-aligned, we can override the alignment case by case in Properties
Both of these can be done to multiple syllables at once.
Bonus technique: Instead of adding and deleting Soprano notes to match another part’s rhythm, just split and re-tie the existing note. Place the caret at the last note of another part’s melisma and U the S note, fix up the lyrics, then select the first S note and T to make it one note again.
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Thank you so much Mark! This really will save me time and effort, and I’m happy to learn. I also appreciate your kind words and encouragement. I’m not a new user, but there’s still so much in this program I’ve feel like I’ve barely touched on, and adjusting extenders by grid durations, selecting a syllable and using the Shift-Opt(Alt)-Arrow keys was an adjustment I had not learned, and it was indeed a feature I was missing.
As for left-aligning melismatic syllables, I usually have that option automatically set in Engraving Options but I have used the Properties Panel to change those when needed. (I just used a template for this that didn’t have that setting.)
And I have also used keystrokes for splitting and re-tieing notes with longer values– definitely more efficient than manual entry. I’d still welcome your thoughts on this– In order to get a Lyric Extender for a note that wouldn’t automatically generate one, we still have to create a melisma where it isn’t eventually going to appear, enter the lyrics (or if the lyric is already entered, re-select the syllable and add a space after it) and then re-incorporate the duration with a tie… it seems to me that where the process becomes cumbersome is that we need to generate multiple notes in order to first get an extender. If the program would allow ANY syllable (or possibly only whole-word, or word-ending syllables) to be selected and then use the Shift-Alt-Arrow command to generate an extender, I think that would provide an easier experience. I wouldn’t want to mess up Dorico’s current automatic generation of extenders in any way, but the workarounds we’re both using hint that it could be possible for a non-melismatic note to be an attachment point for a syllable that can be extended. Might that be a worthwhile wish (or feature request) in your consideration?
The thing about left-aligning in Properties is that when the Soprano goes back to being a single note, the syllables go centered again, so you have to override (unless you’ve set whole words and end-syllables to left-align by default, which is perverse but possible).
P.S. I’m just another user; you can tell Steinberg people by the little circle logo in the corner of their avatars. But Daniel & the team will see your post sooner or later.
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Ah, that makes sense and because I was using a template where syllables with extenders were centered by default I didn’t realize that. (I know that isn’t the accepted norm, but I serve a couple of publishers who have that preference.) I appreciate your feedback and thoughts on all this– and taking time to respond in such helpful ways!
If you place lyrics in all the places which require extensions, you can simply copy or move those lyrics to single notes which otherwise wouldn’t have extensions. Both the extension and the justification are retained. This is, on the other hand, occasionally inconvenient, as I often copy lyrics to other systems which have the same lyrics but different rhythms, like single notes not requiring extensions, and then I have to make sure that there aren’t unnecessary extensions or incorrectly left-aligned syllables.