I’m writing a piece where the string instruments use “col legno battuto” a lot. Now, to notate this, I’m of course using the playing technique “col legno battuto”. The problem - unless I’m missing something very obvious - is that this is an attribute PBT and hence it has to be applied (and will appear in the music) on every single note that is played. Let’s say one player is playing c.l.b. with different notes and note values for 8 bars. Let’s say there are lots of small note values in there too. Let’s say there are maybe 30-40 notes that should be played col legno battuto. I’m sure we all agree that 30-40 occurrences of “col legno battuto” in those bars simply doesn’t make sense. So I tried to walk down the path of a custom playing technique and corresponding playback technique with the same name but being a direction rather than attribute. I managed to create one, it looks fine in the score. But then I spent several hours in the “Playback techniques…” and “Playing techniques…” to get it to play back correctly without success. I’m using NotePerformer 5. Has anybody else been in this situation? I might keep on until I get it to work, BUT: how convenient wouldn’t it be if this was an option the “Playing Techniques” panel below!? Just a small toggle switch to change from Attribute to Direction. In string instruments playing this is very common. Sometimes a technique is applied only to a few notes, but sometimes you play the technique for several bars, or even throughout the piece. (God forbid that I will ever write a piece where someone has to play col legno battuto the whole time. 
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I think the team slightly blurred the attribute/direction distinction a couple of versions ago. And this causes confusion.
If you apply a technique (that triggers a direction, like col legno) to a single note, the technique will be switched on until you change it (nat. or ord.) - this was the old behaviour and still works.
But if you give it duration (select some notes and apply the technique), Dorico will only apply the technique to that selection and will silently revert. (Though you can turn on the continuation line property to see the extent of the technique)
Personally I think this a bad development, which goes against Dorico’s semantic approach and can lead to errors. But I’m likely in the minority.
I don’t think you are, actually. This might be one of the pitfalls in the PT and PBT complex leading to issues with score representation and playback. The process of handling the PT > PBT > XMap chain should be as transparent and logical as possible…
Hi Janus, I agree that this is indeed confusing and I already had some inexplainable time consuming issues with it till Daniel explained the zero length vs defined length direction type. in another post.
So if I understand correctly there is Direction, Attribute with each note marked and Highlight/ed/length based direction/attribute where you can activate but by default don’t have a continuation bar above.
If the playback technique is an attribute, then the playing technique will be applied to each note individually.
So, if you make a selection and apply the playing technique, you will get that technique repeated on every note.
I’m on the fence. I do think it is a bit confusing, but after getting used to it, I actually prefer not littering my scores with ‘nat’ or ‘ord’ and not having to fiddle with a too many mutual exclusions. For typical directions, like col legno or con sordino, I’m fine using the canceling techniques but for custom techniques, in particular ones I’ll eventually hide, I now prefer the auto-cancel after a direction with length.
So how do your players know what to do? You expect them to guess?
I don’t disagree about the convenience, but it’s a bit odd for a notation program to favour something that is hidden!
My “players” for mockups are orchestral libraries and with the exception of NotePerformer, they don’t guess. They need very explicit directions that a human would consider superfluous, e.g., from cremona: 4 different legato techniques, or from eastwest: Sus Molto. I use custom techniques explicitly for variety. I don’t think a human would appreciate seeing “rebowed legato” in their parts.
I’m not sure what you mean by “favour”, but it’s important for mockups to be able to use a wide variety of articulations that aren’t in the standard playbook or variations of standard techniques for variety.
Just to clarify my point here, I have two screenshots. The first is how it turns out with the default attribute PT, the other is my custom PT which uses a direction PBT. I’m okay with this, as long as I can get my custom PT to play back correctly, which I can’t. I’m pretty sure that this is something I can fix by working a bit more with it. (Any advice is most welcome.) My other point, though, is that it would be very convenient to be able to quickly switch between attribute and direction. And a clean way to inform the player would obviously be to add a suffix “sempre” if it’s a direction. Then “ord.” would clarify when the technique ends.
I don’t think that’s right. The default for col legno battuto is direction.
I suspect at some point you have changed it.
This is incorrect. By default, col legno battuto is a direction:
So I think whatever changes you made to this technique, if you reset them to factory defaults, you will get what you are after (col legno cancelled by nat. or ord.). You can try re-applying the NotePerformer playback template as well.
Whoops, read right past @Janus 's comment.
You are right. I changed it back to direction now, and it works as expected. I can’t remember changing it, but I must have fumbled with it at some point. Thanks for pointing this out!
Yes you are both right, and I’m a bit embarrassed. I have changed the original PBT back to Direction, and it works perfectly. But I still don’t understand why I couldn’t get my custom PT/PBT to play back correctly. I must be missing how to connect the the PBT to the NP expression map. Any hints on that?
And after removing my custom PT/PBT/XprSwitch the playback on the original PT is now broken, it plays back as regular arco 
I really need to figure out how to map the PBT to the correct sound in the Expression Map. I’m reluctant to just reset it, because I really want to understand what’s going on.
If you are using NotePerformer, simply re-apply the playback template and you should be good.
I have a Playing Technique labeled “Alternative”, with an up/down arrow glyph, which is connected to a Playback Technique set to “Direction”. I have a few of these placed in my score:
But when I look in Play Mode, I see the “Alternate” Playing Technique appears to get triggered many more times that I would expect:
I placed the three “Alternate” instances on the first chord of each phrase. (Selecting a single note didn’t make a difference). Does Dorico handle chords differently that if this were a single note melody?
