Multiple Custom Playing Technique Fonts - Helpful For Playback Score

Dorico
1

Link to my post in the Dorico forum.

Multiple Custom Playing Technique Fonts - Helpful For Playback Score

I am completely uninterested in engraving, apologies to those whose primary interest is that.

But as a playback-oriented user I just ran into something that will prove quite helpful with my playback score being visually cluttered up with more frequent or stacked playback techniques.

I have never fiddled much with fonts because I considered them an engraving matter. But for a particular project, Beethoven’s 7th Symphony movement 2, I created “Score - B7 2” playing and playback techniques. This was useful because in this movement standard staccatos and staccato under slur are pervasive, but so far as I understand they are not to be taken to have the same intention as to what those markings would be in in a modern context. This is confirmed by listening to actual performances.

So by combining expression map entries with my custom “Score - B7 2” I could customize for this project how any particular standard marking should play back. Staccato + Score - B7 2 or Staccato + Legato + Score - B7 2 can play back as intended without changing the playback of standard techniques in my expression map. But I found that the score marking of “B7” that I set up for the playing technique was very distracting and cluttered up my score unacceptably when all I wanted to focus on was the score and it’s playback needs.

There is a default font set up in Dorico for Playing Techniques Font. I figured out that the solution to clutter was to duplicate that font, adjust the font size, and call it Playing Techniques Font medium, or Playing Techniques Font small, or whatever I want. This way for any given technique I can select the font size I want for that particular technique. This already looks much better and should prove very useful to me. Techniques that need to be standard size will be so, but techniques that are there only for playback can be de-emphasized.

Don’t know if this is helpful to others but I thought I’d share this discovery, the usefulness of some engraving features for someone only interested in playback.

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Just finished my first run-through in the Beethoven playback score implementing this technique, and I am astonished how useful it is … at least for me. There are a few isolated places in the score where a standard staccato works best. But the custom playing technique allowed me to add the B7 2 technique in a bunch of places rather quickly. Also, it left me the freedom to use the staccato technique unmodified when appropriate. And the smaller text of B7 worked great visually. Very happy to have stumbled onto this.