Hi… Something that has always confounded me a bit… I work mostly on drum charts/transcriptions. When I select a note to move it, or whatever, I invariably seem to select somewhere that it thinks I want to select all notes that share a stem? I know if I slow down, and be more precise, I can make sure to select just the intended note…
I’m wondering if there an option to perhaps be a bit more forgiving in this selection interaction? SO I don’t have to be so careful/precise in my picking? perhaps theres a setting that is defaulting to ‘chord’ selection vs. ‘note’ selection?
The cursor does select more than just at the very tip of the arrow, and this was a deliberate design choice. The only reliable way I know to get more specific with a click is to zoom in.
Since I’m used to this behavior, I sometimes make use of the ability to select e.g. 2 noteheads with one click. But for single notes Janus’s way is more efficient.
Also if you get near the stem of a chord, it does select the whole chord, which is more often useful – again if you know it does that.
Thanks, Guys… I definitely can understand the benefit of selecting the coord in the general sense for pitched instruments… thanks for the tip on the up/down arrow, @Janus.
I just wish there was an option when working on drum kit parts that the selection behavior was more specific to the notehead within the pick proximity… but perhaps knowing this trick will be less frustrating now
You could also have a separate layout for your drum set where it’s displayed as single-line instruments. This might make selecting just notes for a specific instrument easier? Because it’s just an alternative view type, other layouts with the 5-line staff presentation type, say, will get updated if you edit notes.
Hi @Andy_Lantz - thx for the thought… i was also wondering if there was such a pick option existed (that could then be inverted by some other option)… but after giving it a shot, I’m not sure what’s going on there. I am shift-option-clicking on the lowest note, and the middle note is selected:
Hi @Lillie_Harris thanks for the idea… frankly, coming out of 5-line view and going into 1-line view takes me out of my groove, so to speak… it can be really quite disorienting… since in 5-line view, I’ve say, 30 measures on a page… I may be looking squarely at measure 35, but then when switching to 1-line view, I am now likely looking at a completely different measure… and have completely lost context of what I was looking at… that context switching is perhaps as ‘expensive’ as the mis-selection. Working predominantly in 1-line view makes it more difficult to easily visually see what notes are lined up. Just giving it a brief try, I also notice that my repeat regions are no longer visible… so who knows what else one would have to adjust for in attempting to work in this way.
You could try selecting something in e.g. bar 35 before switching layouts, which should keep that selection centered in the view; but if it doesn’t work for you, don’t use that method! It’s one option of many.
I’m not sure where I originally saw that selection method, but I did find the documentation for it which only says that Shift-Option-Click can be used to select an item “behind another item” (Dorico 5.0.0 manual, “Selecting/Deselecting notes and items individually” p. 424).
I was able to reproduce the behavior you saw, and after experimenting a bit, had to conclude that I’m no longer sure I completely understand all of the nuances of this selection feature. I’ve used it successfully in non-percussion instruments (piano) to select individual notes of chords, but not in the percussion example you gave to select just a single desired percussion instrument. Sometimes it selected the correct note; sometimes it selected the other note as in your experience (when two percussion instruments were present). It did seem that successively Shift-Option-Clicking on a chord or multiple percussion instruments would cycle among the notes in the group, which could potentially be useful. For now, this remains a mystery for me.
