Sometimes when I add a pizz marking the playback remains pizz until I score the next section with an arco marking. Fine. That’s what I expect.
But sometimes when I add a pizz. marking there’s a line (or an invisible line with a visible circle at the end of it.) The pizz. playback only lasts as far as the line is extended. So if I add more measures of pizzicato, I also have to extend the line. Now I’m 20 measures into my pizzicato passage and decide I need a few more bars. I have to scroll back two pages, select the original pizz. marking, scroll forward two pages and stretch the invisible line. Or add an additional pizz. marking and hide it. This all feels much more complicated than it needs to be.
Why is the behavior normal sometimes (as in the first example) and other times more complicated as in the second example?
It means that it remains in effect from the place it’s triggered until the indication that cancels it (arco).
As @LAE is mentionning above, the exception is that if you apply it while multiple notes are selected, it will only apply for the duration of those selected notes.
So make sure you select only one note when you add Pizz and it should work as you want.
[What you describe can also happen if you accidentally have pizz. selected and press Shift+Alt+Right Arrow several times: that will create the line that defines the duration of the playing technique — so it will stop at the end of that line, even if there’s no arco. But this is likely not what happend to you.]
When writing for humans, you most often want the version you describe, which reads “here is the start sign, please do it until further notice”.
When using Dorico for music production on the other hand, you may want the version “please apply a certain playing technique to these 5 selected notes - and don’t make me put a ‘back to normal’ sign everywhere”.
The second version is less suited for humans because obviously they would not know when to eg. remove the mute from their trumpet without the respective information. (Of course there are exceptions where it’s clear from the context when to change to another playing technique.)
When using Dorico for music production on the other hand, you may want the version “please apply a certain playing technique to these 5 selected notes - and don’t make me put a ‘back to normal’ sign everywhere”.
But even when one is using Dorico for music production, while a human may never play those pizzicato notes, some human is going to read the notes in the score. Otherwise, I’d be working in Logic or Cubase and dealing with key switches and not bothering with notation. So a playing technique like pizz. (or mutes) still needs a visual cancellation for the technique line to show what is happening.
This seems to be an incomplete concept that needs to borrow from the way Dorico handles instrument switches. It would be very useful if I used a line for indicating a performance technique, to have the very next note after that line automatically show the cancellation. (‘arco’ to cancel pizz., ‘open’ to cancel straight mute.)
But of course, now I understand MY mistake in selecting multiple notes when applying playing techniques.
But while we’re talking about playing techniques - I’ve tried to use the popover to apply stopping to a passage of horn notes. When I write the word ‘stopped’ into the popup, it writes the word ‘stopped’ on each note. When I type “+” into the popup, I select the second + (being careful to avoid the EXTREMELY MISLEADING ‘mute’ cross which I have never seen in any score). But this applies the + with a line over the following notes. And I would like to do the standard notation of a cross on each note.
So I am forced to open the right side zone to dig out the stopped cross (again, being careful to avoid the EXTREMELY MISLEADING mute cross).
Applying individual crosses (as it did with the word stopped) from the popup would make more sense to me. Yes, this is an exception to the concept of playing technique ‘lines’ being used for trumpet mutes and pizzicato. But Dorico is already making an exception when I use the word ‘stopped’ and applying it to multiple notes as a word. Can the same exception be applied to the cross symbol to achieve standard notation from the popup?
Thank you! Very simple solutions to my overly verbose question. The more I ask questions here and learn the solutions already there, the more I realize how deep Dorico is.
There might be situations when you have a pizz and then when you go back to arco you want to combine it with some other playing technique, like for instance “sul tasto, arco” where the “, arco” could be a suffix to the PT sul tasto. Then it might be handy for the pizz to have a duration. Maybe a bit far-fetched and not a good example, but you get the idea.
