I’m a composer in my Doctorate who just started learning Dorico from Finale. I’m excited about a lot of the features but I find the inputting of intervals much more cumbersome. I would really like to be able to add intervals with the number corresponding to its size (i.e. Num-2 equals a diatonic second.) I’ve been reading people say “just use a MIDI keyboard” etc. but for composing on the go with a laptop the way it’s set up now is much slower than Finale, which feels like an unfortunate step back.
P.S. I know you can download 3rd party software to make this possible or whatever but I don’t think that should be necessary, as intervals are the building blocks of music not like an obscure extended technique.
Get to know the note tools popover (shift-I). It is much more powerful and precise. OK it’s an extra keystroke for diatonic intervals, but it makes everything very simple to do.
I hope this doesn’t come off as too weird, but I do think other people might feel the same way. Being able to just press a button helps my composing flow naturallty. The shift-I mechanism feels much more like engraving, and a creative hinderance. Maybe I’m spoiled but I’m just being truthful about how I use my notation software, and what would make it better for me!
I use it all the time for my composing. You can use to manipulate passages in many different ways: transpose, map to different scales, invert or rotate etc. etc. But I guess you’ll never be happy because it not like Finale.
Hi @james.lowrie, possibly reassigning the key command "Add Intervals "to I (Instead of the default Shift+I), saves you a key press. (And yes, it overwrites the “Toggle Insert” (mode) shortcut, which may be also useful for other reasons):
@james.lowrie
There is also a different possible approach: drag the notes to the new position keeping Option(Alt) pressed: it copies the notes to the new pitch:
If you’re comfortable editing JSON files, you can also add shortcuts for these directly to your keycommands_en.json file. For example, the command for adding a pitch a fifth above the current pitch is NoteInput.TransposeOrAddNotesToSelection?Definition=5
Take a look at this post, and others in the thread:
I know what you mean, and actually I’ve been doing what is in Aaron’s thread (I’m in it) and since them, I very happily can use my numbers (along with ctrl and ctrl-shift) to add intervals without any other key (and I know and love shift-i, which is great, but I like these interval keys more for that). Let me know if you’re blocked or something.
