note colours / notes out of range

I know it’s not possible to have your cake and eat it, too, but why isn’t it possible to have both “view note colours” and “notes out of range” checked? Why do they cancel each other out? Isn’t it possible to reserve one colour to specify “out of range” – or two colours, one for “difficult” and another for “impossible”?

Thank you!

Because voice colors are assigned mathematically by rule given the order in which they are introduced, so the formula does not skip over colors to allow for out-of-range notes.

And since, after a certain number of voices, some voices may be similar shades of the same basic hue, I think you would find the result confusing even if the Team did program it in.

It could be done, but we decided it would be too visually noisy and unlikely to have high informational content.

I would welcome this “noise” – sometimes I’m arranging something complicated and pasting voices from a piano reduction and that brings up all sorts of voice / stem issues - so I keep “note colours” checked – but then I end up with a note out of range for the oboe that I forget about. This happens more often than I’d like, not because I don’t know the range of an instrument but more because of deadlines.

Maybe “notes out of range” can be more like a “highlight” rather than a note colour? what would you think of that?

Thank you for considering!

You can create keyboard shortcuts for voice colours and notes out of range if you want. Edit / Preferences, then View > Note and Rest Colors.

sure, that I’ve done - but it still doesn’t solve for the desire to have both note colours and out of range notes shown at the same time.

methinks “out of range” should be on by default? who wants to write out-of-range notes for an instrumentalist – that is unless they’re using some sort of alternate tuning or other devices to expand the range?

Please, no. I know my ranges and don’t want Dorico obnoxiously “helping”! :sunglasses:

Nor do I consider such a feature a worthwhile expenditure of development time at this stage of the program’s growth.

Well – I do!

Some do and some don’t. You may already know your ranges but students and composers who didn’t study classical orchestration don’t. The option is there already – Dorico knows how to do it. It’s just a matter of making it more helpful. From what Daniel says, it can be done - it’s just they thought it’d be visually overwhelming - and maybe it is to some people - but it’s also very helpful. Some people find Birtwistle’s music visually overwhelming, others find it liberating. I’m not going to judge.

Please enable the feature – you don’t have to use it, but I sure will. :slight_smile:

Thanks!

My objection is to making it the default. Users can turn it on if they want, easily.

Oh that doesn’t impact what I need - I just want to have the option of checking “Note Colours” and “Notes out of range” without one canceling the other out.

We don’t have any plans for this, I’m afraid. It wouldn’t be simple to do.

How about notes out of range colored grey?

No, we don’t have any plans to change either of these features at present, either in isolation or together.

Maybe that’s a slightly different subject but is it possible to turn of the coloured out of range notes by default. Every time I start a new document I get annoyed by it as I alway tend to write in extreme range for instruments.

It’s not possible at the moment, no. Possibly we might provide some preferences for the options in the View menu in future.