Pedal markings copy/paste/join

Dorico
#1

Hi there!

Started playing with Dorico’s piano pedal markings, which I find generally awesome. One question though, which stems with how pedal repeats are implemented conceptually, which is that it’s a single line, with added repeats, not individual pedal lines (like in Sibelius).

In that case, unless I don’t understand something, how can I copy/paste pedal lines and repeats? For example, if I create a bar with a particular pedal structure, and I want to duplicate it, with R or something else. I get this:

But I would like the pedal line to continue through, with a repeat in the start of bar 6. Is there a way to join the 2 lines? Apart from extending the first line, then having to re-enter all repeats manually in the second bar is there something else to do?

What if I duplicated a section of 4-8 bars, or more? That’s really not convenient.

#2

You cannot currently merge two pedal lines, I’m afraid, so you would indeed have to extend the original line and then re-add the retakes. I appreciate this is not super-convenient, but there are ways to make the repetition a little less painful: you could switch on the ‘Allow multiple items to be created with the mouse’ option and set ‘Load cursor with item’ in Preferences, which should allow you to load the mouse pointer with a pedal retake from the Playing Techniques panel and click in each spot where you want the retake to appear without needing to reselect it from the panel all the time.

#3

Thanks for the tip, I will try.

Are there any plans to get that sorted out? I understand how the implemented solution makes sense when inputting music for which you already know the range of pedalling (and even then, if there are complex pedalling patterns, copy/pasting them might be a big time saver). However, as a composer, who creates directly on the computer in the notation software, I need flexibility as I cannot know ahead of time what the final pedalling will end up like.

#4

We could certainly look into adding a feature to merge separate pedal lines. I’ll talk to András, the developer who worked on pedal lines, about it and see what he thinks. Unfortunately it’s probably not something we can add in the immediate future due to our current workload with cues, percussion, fingering, and so on.