After 50+ years of doing jazz charts (and other styles) and only 3 months from deserting the Finale ship I am missing the convenience of having created 4-5 different length versions of the dot articulation (with kbd shortcuts assigned for easy use).
Having played in countless jazz bands over the years as well, I realised that to make my play-backs sound as swingy as possible I needed more than one dot.
The one lonely staccato event in Dorico is not enough. Set to work with a quarter note it is too short to use with an eighth. Plus all the other subtly different occasions call for a variety of lengths. I’ve never seen Staccatissimo used in jazz to give at least a second option, plus it looks wrong.
It doesn’t look possible to do this in Dorico. The only way seems to be to shorten (or lengthen) notes is in Play Mode Key Editor. While that feature is a big step up from Finale and these programs are not supposed to be notation-software-logic-pros I think that the possibility to duplicate the dot and assign different play-bank lengths would be received with a round of applause by the oft overlooked jazz writers.
Just a suggestion, not a complaint, my Dorico journey so far is full of pleasant surprises.
Thanks Dan, no sorry, I’m not talking about the swing ratio but the length percentage one can set for a staccato. If I set it to say 75% it will be right, depending on tempo, to be used on an eighth note but too long for a quarter note. Jazz players interpret dotted notes correctly by feel and to have just one version of dot accent will never make swing phrases come out correctly for play-back. In Finale it is/was possible to create multiple dot accents of varying length. This choice is not available in Dorico and I think it would be easy to make available.
Perhaps you can leverage note length conditions in the expression map together with the length % parameter. e.g., Staccato/very short=length 25%, Staccato/medium=length 50% etc.
This is certainly possible now with Playing Techniques, Playback Techniques, and Expression Maps. Create Playback Techniques for whatever lengths you want, create Playing Techniques that look like staccatos but actually trigger the Playback Techniques you created, and then assign those Playback Techniques in your expression map. If you save all that as a default, you’ll only have to do all the setup once and then it will be available for future use.
In the gif below, only the first staccato is a real staccato, the others are Playing Techniques I created called Medium short, Super short, and Not short at all. You can see the names as I hover over them in the right panel.
Add those to your Expression Map and you have playback.
I’d agree with @derAbgang that you could probably achieve this with Expression Map note durations. I’d certainly try that first, and then go on to the more customized approach that @FredGUnn outlines.
I actually posted a demo of this using “short quarters” a few years back and how it could be used for jazz here:
As the OP mentioned, staccatissimo is virtually unused in jazz. They could change the appearance of it in Music Symbols to look like a staccato and change the length in Playback Options / Note Durations for another easy option.
Hey many thanks guys, that’s fantastic. I’m not the most clued up guy when it comes to the non-musical behind the scenes stuff but I will certainly take those 3 solutions on board, especially Fred’s. It will open the door for some more real jazz play-backs. Yeah, looking forward to that.
Hi again Fred, only being 3 months into Dorico I hope you won’t mind if I ask for a little more detail about your answer?
I followed your steps your steps and created 3 extra staccatos St35 / St50 / St75. But I’m stuck at the dot creation stage.
The attached screenshots will tell you what I’ve done so far. Not sure if it’s all correct.
Did you use SMuFL or Unicode? The articStaccatoAbove dot I chose is too small so far so I’ll need to enlarge it but mostly how do you get the above and below note versions.
With what I’ve done to now I get a small dot above but no shortening of note on play-back.
Since Playing Techniques aren’t actually articulations, a single PT can only default to Above or Below, but you can flip it to the other side with F. (Or create Above and Below variants.) You can specify different placement settings for Above and Below though. One annoying issue with this editor is that you can’t specify X and Y offsets for the first character from the origin point. You have to input a blank space first, and then the staccato if you want to specify offsets. This editor code is reused in several areas of the program and that’s an annoying issue everywhere it pops up.
Many thanks Fred, much appreciated. I’ll go through your suggestion but not till tomorrow. (Grand kids sitting day). I’ll keep you posted with progress. Pretty sure I understand where I’m going wrong, must be assigning EM’s to the players. Despite the shortcomings of the editor I think this way of getting extra staccatos is pretty amazing.
OK, it’s a new day! You hit the nail on the head with your very last sentence: Make sure the map gets assigned to the player!
I followed your first Emap screenshot (blindly) where you created one called Staccato stuff and I added a new one called Stacc variations. Since this whole staccato conversation came up while I’m working on a personalized big band template that uses the Garritan big band library and their expression maps assigned to 7 instrument groups (brass x3, sax, WW, Bass, Gtr) I’m not surprised that my 3 dot accent variations didn’t make any impression on note length.
So, since I don’t see any way to combine EMs (or maybe copy/paste) it looks I will have to add my 3 Stacc variations to each of the 7 Garritan EMs that are assigned to my band.
The idea of changing the Staccatissimo shape to a dot is another clever idea that I’m considering. But while my main composition/arranging path is down the jazz road I do like string writing and might keep that one to it’s regular fate.
I’m going to re-shuffle what I’ve started and leave the 50% length one, probably most used, to be the Dorico built in one and make the 3 variations to be 25, 35 & 75% with above and below dots.
Would you keep the EM that I started (Stacc variations, adjusted to the above) for future use?
Thanks FredGUnn, you helped to open my mind to the inner workings of Dorico which is very welcome and necessary.
Yeah, you’ll probably just need to add those to each.
You could always keep it as an easy way to document what you’ve done. I know I’ve revisited files years later and couldn’t remember exactly how I had things configured. Keeping a map with just those alterations could potentially be useful, even if you aren’t using it directly.
