I’ve always had some trouble with string harmonics in Dorico, and I’ve spent the evening trying to track down the issue.
I just mapped the first 5 partials on the 4th string of the violin. The top stave is what the sounding pitch should be. The bottom is the notated pitch.
Note that there are two pitches in red. Those pitches also are not playing the correct pitch. They are both playing the notated and not what the harmonic should be. Can anyone advise on what the issue is? Thanks!
For natural harmonics with the circle, Dorico assumes these are notated at their sounding pitch.
strings natural harmonics.dorico (2.2 MB)
For playback of “white diamond” natural harmonics on strings, Dorico will interpret them as touch points if it can, but this is inherently a bit ambiguous so it makes some simplifying assumptions in doing this. I may have misunderstood what your chart is showing, but one of the assumptions made is that Dorico only considers the first node of a given partial (the one closest to the nut) on each string - I think that might be the problem here as the touch points at E4 (b.5) and B4 (b.7) seem to be a multiples of the one at B3 (b.2).
The fifth partial is a vibration of the string in, well, five parts, separated by 4 equidistant nodes. Each of them can be (and in practice often are) used as a touch point to invoke the partial. So not only the nodes at 1/5 and 4/5, but also 2/5 (touch-sixth) and 3/5 (touch-tenth) should work.
Indeed. We do support the different nodes for natural harmonics in guitar tab (where it affects the actual notation), but we don’t currently support it for playback of the “white-diamond” appearance on strings, nor do we support it for artificial harmonics. We know people would like us to add more functionality here and it is on the list of things we would like to improve.
