Hi, I’m doing some music that has a large number of single notes (not phrases) that need to be notated 8va below, interspersed with phrases that are not.
The ottava tool under “clefs” works fine, but I can only do one note at a time, which is a lot of clicking. Is there any kind of shortcut to speed up the process?
For playing techniques, I can use option-click to repeat the previous marking, but this doesn’t work for the octave tool.
As a related question, what is the reasoning behind the Dorico behavior with this and playing techniques where if I command-click multiple items (not shift-clicking a continuous set of items) that Dorico doesn’t simply apply the marking to all of the selected items? It seems to me that if I want an entire passage marked 8va it would be simple enough to select the entire passage, so if I select several discontinuous items, why does Dorico make it continuous and mark it as such? I don’t see the advantage to this behavior. Similarly, if I want to mark a bunch of downbows or similar playing technique, Dorico just marks the first note in the selection. It would be handy to be able to mark up the music a bit more easily, especially for pedagogically-oriented music.
I’m still learning my way around the program and attempting to unlearn decades of ingrained Finale workaraounds so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something I’ve missed here.
edit: I did figure out that using the clef tool via shift-C and typing 8vb works, and is a little faster (at least it doesn’t involve clicking), but still wondering about the general problem
You can copy an 8va line with alt-click on Windows (I’m not sure what the Mac equivalent of “Alt” is).
If you select two notes and add a 8va, Dorico creates a line starting and the first note and ending at the second one. That works the same way for other things like slurs, beaming a group of notes, etc. You don’t need to select the complete passage with all the notes in between.
For playing techniques like downbow, when you select a passage Dorico creates one technique that spans the whole passage. In the Properties window at the bottom of the screen, you can select the “continuation type” to show the symbol on every note, add the text “simile”, draw a line showing where the property ends, etc. The default is to display the symbol on the first note and nothing else (The default isn’t very useful for marking several downbows, but all playing techniques work the same).
All Playing Techniques don’t have to work the same. You can go into the Playing Techniques Editor and change the default continuation type for any Playing Technique, and Save as Default so it’ll work the same way in other projects.
Rob, thanks for responding. I understand that it works that way, I’m saying that it is counter to how selecting individual items generally works (and what I would personally find useful). I don’t want a continuation line past the individual note, I want to select a bunch of individual notes (that are not next to each other) and have them all individually marked with the ottava marking, leaving the intervening notes loco. If I have specific up and down markings, I want them on specific notes—I’d like to just assign them to the notes I select. Since it’s no more work to command-click than it is to shift-click then I don’t understand why clicking specific notes acts like you selected a whole group of notes—it seems like a waste of keyboard resources.
The equivalent of alt is “option” on Mac, but option-click doesn’t work for 8va (it works for playing techniques, though).
I tried this out, and it certainly works if you want an uninterrupted row of the same playing technique on every note. What still doesn’t seem possible is to just assign the technique to selected notes (rather than the selected notes and everything in between).
I expect there is some reason that select items doesn’t work here, but I am perplexed as to what that could be.
That’s not a meaningful statement, really—presumably every question could be answered that way, of course it works the way it does because it was designed that way.
That doesn’t answer why it was designed that way, though.
If software always “did what it was designed to do”, computer programming would be easy
FWIW Shift-click and Ctrl-click do NOT have the same effect if the two clicks are on different staves. Try it when creating slurs or dynamics hairpins, for example.
Ha, true enough. Ctrl-click on PC is equivalent to command-click on Mac, I believe. Macs have a control key but it’s used differently in the shortcuts.
Good point about different staves; this is kind of what I was getting at, I assume there’s some reason for the behavior but wonder what the advantage could be. It doesn’t really answer why, but it does show that the program is perfectly capable of treating the items differently and it in fact does so when they are on different staves, and that the behavior of different markings can be different.
If the Dorico can put two hairpins on two items when they are in different staves, then presumably it could do so in one staff; in my opinion the advantage of that (at least with some markings, maybe not hairpins) behavior on a single staff outweighs requiring shift-click or click and drag to select a range of items.
