Meter for grouping 3/2 correctly

Hello,

I am notating some renaissance style music in 3/2 where the rhythm grouping is constantly changing between 2+2+2 and 3+3.
The notation [ half, quarter, quartertiedtoquarter, quarter ] should never occur. I have tried to find a setting in the notation options but none of them seems to cover this. Is there some other trick I could use, like notating the meter differently?

For now I have resorted to forcing the durations.

Thanks
LAE
tie.PNG

To be honest, I don’t quite understand why Dorico breaks the half note in the lower bar in your image but not in the upper bar. Replace the two eighth notes with a quarter and all is fine.
Anyway, I don’t see a global solution either. Notating the meter differently would probably mess up all the 2+2+2 bars. Of course you could enter a local (shift-M and alt-enter) [3+3]/4 signature into the offending bars and hide it – perhaps that would be more the ‘Dorico way’. But is that more convenient than force duration?

It can be more convenient because the time signature signposts can be copied and pasted, speeding the work considerably in most cases.

To be honest, I don’t quite understand why Dorico breaks the half note in the lower bar in your image but not in the upper bar. Replace the two eighth notes with a quarter and all is fine.

Yes, this is a tendency I have noticed as well. The notation options for rhythmic grouping of half notes don’t seem to apply correctly when there are eighth notes around.

Also, shouldn’t the options for “Quarter note (crotchet) denominator time signatures with half bars” apply to 4/2 as well? Renaissance polyphony tends to be in 4/2, and getting the half notes to group correctly and the eighth notes to beam correctly requires a lot of manual fiddling.

To be honest, in this specific case I cannot see the advantages of the “Dorico approach”. In other music, yes.

Hmm. Good idea! Thanks, Claude! :slight_smile:

The reason is that Dorico’s detection of syncopated patterns expects the “short” notes of a short-long-long-etc.-short pattern to be a single note or rest of the “short” duration; notes or rests adding up to the “short” duration (such as a pair of eighths instead of a quarter) break the pattern.

Thanks Daniel - that is very interesting to know, I’m always curious what Dorico is up to under the hood. If possible, I’d like to request that the algorithm (eventually) change to accept these subdivisions; I think I’ve run into similar situations from time to time.

Yes, I agree that in the fullness of time it would be ideal to handle these kinds of patterns more automatically, though it does greatly enhance the likelihood of false positives producing peculiar results under other similar circumstances, of course!