Make lock duration when pasting notes

Dorico
1

Hi,

I couldn’t get lock duration to work for pasting an entire passage of notes, only for entering individual notes.
Is there a way to do this properly?
If not, please consider it as a feature request :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Dan

2

Select the passage and press O for lock duration before you copy and paste.

It won’t work if you select the notes, copy, and then press O and paste.

3

I think Dan means Lock to Duration (L), not Force Duration (O). I could have sworn this used to work, but I can’t make it work here either.

4

Not sure I’m following this. Are we saying that we have copied a passage of notes which may have notes of arbitrary mixed duration (e.g. some 1/16, some 1/8, etc) but we want to paste them all as some pre-selected duration - say whole notes? So the pasted passage can and likely will have a different total duration then the copied passage?

Am I understanding this correctly?

5

OK, sorry for misreading the question.

Lock duration isn’t really on my radar - personally I hardly ever use have a use for it, though I can see what it is useful for.

6

Lock Duration lets you repitch the notes in a passage without messing up the existing rhythm. That is useful if you are writing block chords for an orchestra section for example - write the rhythm in one part, copy it to the other parts, then enter the notes.

I must admit I can’t see a common use case for copying and pasting the pitches from somewhere else, though.

7

Neither do I… Could you elaborate?

8

Sure - my use case is I have a SATB arrangement, which I’ve started voicing already. So some staves have passages with the same note durations but different pitches.

I then decided to make a major change to the rhythm. I started a new project, wrote the main melody with the new note durations, and now I want to take one of the voices from the original project and apply the same new note durations on it, in some passage.

So I took the melody in the new project in the passage I wanted to voice, copied it to another voice’s staff, and then tried copying the notes from the original project over that, with Lock Duration turned on. I wanted it to just change the pitches, due to Lock Duration turned on - but the durations were also copied.

btw, another way I thought to do it was copy the durations and paste it over the melody - but I couldn’t find such a feature to copy-paste durations.

Thanks,
Dan

9

Another option would be to change the durations of the notes in Insert mode, so Dorico moves the following music to match the length of the note you changed.

The “best” (i.e. quickest) way depends exactly what you want to do, of course.