I believe there is an issue with the pedal steel tablature. Pedal steel should sound an octave lower than written (like standard guitar notation). When notes are entered on the staff the resulting Tab is in the wrong octave. I just came from Finale so I apologize if I am misunderstanding something.
Interesting - this may indeed be an error on our part. If you use the Instrument Editor to set the two controls in the “Transposition” section here:
to “C3” instead of “C4”, does that then give you the result you expect? If so the tablature is right and it’s actually the notation that’s wrong.
Thanks for the suggestion. In trying it I realized the following. It is more than an octave transposition issue because Dorico has the Tab for the instrument wrong. The open fret notes are correct only on strings 1-2. Strings 3-10 are an octave too low relative to them. So, when I tried the fix in the instrument editor the top two strings were correct but 3-10 were still wrong.
Pedal steel reentrant tuning.dorico (817.9 KB)
So, just to double-check I understand what you’re saying, should the tuning be: B1, D2, E2, F#2, G#2, B2, E3, G#3, D#3, F#3?
You can edit this yourself in the Edit Strings and Tuning dialog, from the instrument menu, to see if this gives the correct behaviour:
If so, do we need to correct both the overall transposition and the tuning of the top two strings in our instrument library, or is it just the tuning of the top two strings that we’ve got wrong?
I am sorry that my previous post is not clear. This is a list of the correct string numbers and the corresponding midi notes:
1-F#4, 2-D#4, 3-G#4, 4-E4, 5-B3,6-G#3, 7-F#3, 8-E3, 9-D3, 10-B2.
So I guess this should be corrected for the Pedals Steel tab default as well as the transposition. Actually, strings one and two are the correct strings…8-10 are the wrong octave. If I change the notes in the “edit strings and tuning dialog” to the above, and change the octave in the instrument editor it does then work the way I would expect. Although no notation program I know of can tab pitch changes associated with the pedals and levers of the instrument, this gets me closer to a workaround like I had in Finale. I might just have to use Adobe Illustrator to indicate pedal and lever changes. Of course I would love it if Dorico would make it possible to do it within the program but I can understand why it might not be the top priority.
Thank you for your help.
Thanks for confirming - we’ll take a look at fixing the tuning for our library in a future update.