I have a piece of music with lots of quarter-note triplets. Unfortunately, they are almost all separate, which requires me to do 4 ; 3 enter over and over again.
The dream, of course, is to have the ability to set one or more specific tuplet ratios-with-note-basis (as in quarter-3:2) and unique shortcuts for each. How close are we to this?
Choose your note value (e.g. 6 for quarter note)
Click the tuplet button in the left bar with the mouse (toggle on)
Click the tuplet button again (toggle off)
Enter your notes.
This gives a single triplet without needing to type 3, reverting to non-triplet entry directly afterwards. You do have to use the mouse, but that’s second nature to me, and I prefer it to using the popover. Although you have to click twice, the second click follows on from the first in the same place.
For continuing triplets enter your notes before clicking the tuplet button the second time.
I use Keyboard Maestro (a macro application for Mac—don’t know if there’s a PC version) widely in every application I use daily, including Dorico. For triplets, I set up F18 to start a triplet and F19 to end it (they’re easy to reach from the numeric keypad.)
And if you do enough “tripletizing" to make it worthwhile, you cd set up a pair of keystrokes for each of several triplet values. You can even use a particular keystroke to trigger the pop up, type whatever you program, and close it with Enter or Return.
This comes down to a double-click, which is acceptably fast. Thanks for that hint (I always used to turn of the tuplets after inputting them, which is a lot slower)!
Anyway, is there a possibility to assign a keyboard shortcut to this button? This would save the time to get to the mouse/touchpad and find the button and therefore make it faster once more.
Yes. Find your keycommands_en.json file. Depending on your language the two letters before .json might be different. The file is somewhere in your AppData or Application support folder. Add these lines within the kStepTimeInput section. Replace X with your desired shortcut. Don’t omit the apostrophes and be careful not to break the json syntax!
{
"NoteInput.StartTupletRun?Definition=3:2" : [ "X" ]
},
The double click method doesn’t work with a shortcut, but you always have the end tuplet shortcut for that. (Instead you can easily create a triplet within a triplet within a triplet within a triplet… )
Hope it helps!
@fkretlow: Thank you for your suggestion! I think I should take the time to get into json, too at some time…
I found the file; on a mac, it’s NOT in the library but the app itself: Just locate the Dorico application in your applications folder. There, ctrl-click on it and select “show package contents”. From there, just navigate to Contents/Ressources and you’ll find the keycommands-files. You should use the one of your language, of course, but the code to add remains the same as far as I understood it.
You shouldn’t edit the one in the application - that will be replaced whenever Dorico is updated. If you run Dorico and in the Key commands editor in Preferences just modify any key command then this will write the key commands file into your application support folder, and then you can follow the instructions above.
I created a key command in preferences to create the the json file. There was only the one key command in the file and so I replaced the command with the tuplet one, but it didn’t work (see attached image). I also tried adding a new line with the tuplet command, but still no luck. I don’t know what a linter is.