Markers and other suggestions/bugs

Hey there !

A member from the FB group, Marc, suggested me to start a thread on some small suggestions to address some bugs I encountered, here they are :

Markers

  • You can’t add markers at any bar in write mode, the popover just defaults to timecode 0:00:00:etc… whether you click on the + button in the panel or use the alt+shift+M shortcut ; I had to go to Play mode so that the marker recognizes where I was at, so it could be cool to be able to add them in Write mode as well to avoid constantly switching with play mode :wink:
  • When you insert a marker at the beginning of a bar, if the bar is cast on a new system, the marker appears at the end of the last system, causing some graphical issues and extra fixing steps ; the only thing for now is to set them a few milliseconds after but it’s annoying having to do that each time

Tuplets

  • It could be nice to be able to convert similar tuplets in Drumkits, for instance from triplets to sextuplets and vice-versa ; right now as each element is treated as a separate instrument everything is messed up when trying to group a selection of hits into tuplets, or make changes in their grouping, even when they are on the same voice.
  • I’m sure it has been asked before, but swing feel is very common in lots of genres outside of jazz and for now handling it is quite a pain, especially when it’s swung in 16th notes (which is very common) instead of 8th notes, for now there are no options for 16th notes ; so I hope at some point in the near future we’ll be able to handle tempo equations more easily (especially since sometimes there are multiple changes in the song between straight and swing feel), and easily convert 3 & 6 tuplets into swung 16th notes when encountering for instance a triplet with made only of 1 & 3 and a rest on the 2nd note of the triplet (or 2 & 5 in a sextuplet)

Rests
Hopefully this will be addressed as well but rests, especially in drum notation, should have the option to be hidden.
In drum notation for instance you sometimes have to beam the snare and toms with the cymbals, sometimes with the kick.
Thing is, in Dorico there’s only one choice, depending on which voice and stem direction the element is.
The workaround that I found is to edit my percussion kit and add duplicates of elements in other voices and with inverted stems and then use the more convenient voice when inputting notes, but it creates extra rests as they’re considered as a new voice. It could be cool to have a smart handling of that :wink:

Thanks anyway to the team for the incredible software, can’t wait to see what the next version will be about (somewhere like in May/June if I understood the new versioning system ?) and which features will be added !

Cheers,

Julien

Hi Julien - I’ve already shared this on Facebook but to confirm for anyone reading here: markers are input at the playhead position, so you just need to move the playhead to the required position before inputting markers, which you can do using the panel or by pressing the default key command Shift-Alt/Opt-M.

Swing playback: there are options for 16th note swing, do you mean you need something else? You can also define your own swings using rhythmic feels. I don’t think there’s a way to auto-detect that pairs of notes in triplets should be turned into e.g. eighth notes and swung, but judicious use of Insert mode and deleting tuplets/shortening notes would fix that up manually.

1 Like

The situation with percussion rests is high up the priority list, by the looks of things: see can't get rid of these drumset rests!.. - #5 by dspreadbury

2 Likes

Hi again Lillie !

Yes I just saw your reply on FB, thanks for the tip about the markers ! :slight_smile:

As for the swing yes I was actually not thinking so much about playback, as I compose/arrange/record/mix inside Cubase most of the time, but more just about notation and convenient stuff upon importing MIDI files : right now there’s no feel equations for swung rhythms, we have to use the Metrico font in a text popover as a workaround ; also a tool like detecting tuplets of 3 or 6 with the missing 2 or 2 & 5 and converting them to straight 16th notes (or 8th notes or others) could save a lot of time when working from MIDI files.
Right now I manually have to do this in 4 steps :

  • select my tuplet
  • modify the length of the 1st note ot half its duration (I mean in the case of a 3plet for instance made of one 8th note and one 16th note, if the first note is already a 16th note and there’s a rest inbetween them this step is skipped, but in most imported MIDI files from my Cubase sessions it’s not the case)
  • shift the last notes to the left (3 in a triplet, or 3 & 6 in a 6-tuplet) by their duration
  • delete the tuplet

I’m sure it could easily be automated as the logic behind it is always the same.

But thanks for the playback links, I already saw that on the Dorico channel but didn’t remember which video as I’ve watched all the videos and hangouts haha (except those in German :stuck_out_tongue: ), I’ll save the link !

ok great to hear that !!!

You can speed up your steps slightly by using Insert mode: when Insert mode is active, lengthening/shortening notes doesn’t leave gaps between them or overwrite, instead notes get pulled closer/pushed further apart. So you could delete the tuplets then turn the first notes from quarter to eighths (or whatever the duration is) and end up with a pair of eighths, in that scenario.

yes I do that for solo instruments but when it comes to drums, when some elements are condensed on the score they’re handled differently so insert mode messes with the actual duration of each element.
Especially when working from MIDI files :
sometimes in Cubase I set my grid to 8th notes, 16th notes, 32nd, 16th triplets, 8th triplets, etc… depending on what’s convenient when writing my drum grooves in the piano roll.
When I export from Cubase and import into Dorico (which is an other topic I could talk hours about as it’s not the easiest and painless task when it comes to drums…) the notes are correctly condensed 77% of the time but I noticed they keep their actual initial duration in the single line instrument view ; so when messing with insert in the 5-line staff it doesn’t mess with what is written when condensed but with each separate element’s duration, so if you have say 2 or 3 elements hit at the same time, it’ll generate extra rests and voices and sometimes tuplet brackets, it’s a real nightmare.
I had to spend over 20 hours since monday just to clean a MIDI import of my drum track and trying to figure out stuff (making me think I could have maybe spent less time rewriting everything) because for now the drum handling is not intuitive, so I’m quite impatient to see what the next updates will be when it comes to drum notation haha, fingers crossed !

Maybe the requantization tool can be useful for this?