Metric modulations

I couldn’t find it in Dorico and searching the forum: how can I write metric notation text (see attached screenshot from Sibelius)

(I know Dorico won’t play swing in this version)
metric modulations.png

Dorico doesn’t really have any good support for writing metric modulations as yet. The plan is that you’ll be able to write them in the same simple way that you can write metronome marks in tempo marks, where you can type e.g. “q. = 126” for “dotted quarter = 126”, so we’d have e.g. “q. = q” for “dotted quarter = quarter”. More complex rhythms such as swing indications etc. are perhaps not technically metric modulations, but hopefully we will have a simple way to create these too, in due course.

I tried to construct a swing indication (see the upmost one in the OP’s example picture above and the attached ‘Swing Indication.png’ image) using Shift-X Music Text and the glyphs at Please wait while you are redirected. I got quite close, but still could not make a good enough marking. Has anybody been able to create one? Thank you.
Swing Indication.png
P.S. As a temporary solution, I loaded the image attached into a Dorico Graphics Frame, which I then scaled properly. Not too bad a compromise, even prints quite fine. :slight_smile:

I was able to make one using the Opus text font (non-triplet)…was pretty straightforward and looks good.

When it does come to pass that metric modulations are easily notate-able in Dorico, I’d like to put in a word for making sure complex ones are possible too. For instance, see Elaine Gould below.

Besides the ability to do those numerical ratios above, I’m particularly interested in the open tuplet brackets. I’m working on an opera that needs several dozen of these, and the existence of 20 or so instrumental parts renders all current workarounds not so useful. Given how advanced Dorico’s tuplet handling is, this seems a logical (and hopefully not too too distant) inclusion :slight_smile:

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+1 for snakeeyes021’s suggestions.

Obviously I agree that metric modulations should withstand Carter, but you state that workarounds don’t actually “work around” right now. You can already do it with System text, which retains formatting and thus should show up exactly the same on all parts:


The only difference to Gould’s example is a bit of a continuation on the tuplet’s bracket; if the difference isn’t negligible, that too can be done with a bit of extra work.

Perhaps John Barron could show in his next Discover Dorico, how Metric Modulations would be achieved best with system text at the moment.

Hmm… You know, I was about to say that I had tried using system text and I was getting a weird sort of glitch where the write mode wasn’t matching the print mode and was thus (at least as far as I could figure it out) unworkable. See attached.

However, because of your example, I figured I might’ve been doing something wrong, and tried once more. The same disparity between write and print mode turned up, but I found that if you ignore the result in the print mode tab and export the file to a PDF anyways, somehow it’s magically correct in the PDF.

So, I retract my previous statement that workarounds are not useful! But it will indeed be nice when this is native :smiley:
print mode.JPG
write mode.JPG

Hopefully someone from the team drops by and chimes in about that bug. I’ve just re-checked my file — I don’t really give proofread stuff while in Print mode, so I most likely wouldn’t have noticed — and it seems I’m not afflicted. Good luck with the opera!

You need to make sure that you use Bravura Text and not Bravura: using Bravura is the cause of the difference in appearance between Write mode and the print preview. The recommended way of adding musical symbols in text in Dorico is not simply to change the font to Bravura, but to use the ‘Music text’ character style, which is chosen from the top right-hand menu in the text editing popover.