I have a bit for vibraphone in a score I’m working on where the proofreading tools (very helpfully!) flagged a mid-bar dynamic as unclear about its placement. Following Gould’s suggestion, I rewrote it to use a tie, using Force Duration. Unfortunately, doing that produces this situation with a hairpin, as seen in this recreation from the project attached at the bottom of this post:
I’ve looked through all the engraving rules and also mucked around a bit with trying to change the engraving manually, to no avail. As it stands, I cannot get the hairpin to re-appear at all, though I can at least move the pp far enough away that it does’t look like a ppp.
I can see why this is hard to get right automatically, so not so much a complaint as asking for help to work around it (and maybe to flag it to the good developers as a thing to be able to iterate on)!
Ah, I can see that fixes the behavior on the sample project, including if I copy over exactly the source from the original—but on the original score, it’s not having the same effect. Regardless of how far I dial that up and regardless of whether I have “Hide hairpins shorter than minimum length” checked or unchecked, it doesn’t change. Even setting it to an absurd value of 40, which does affect all the other hairpins in the score, isn’t prompting this one to show up at all.
Notably, as you can see in the “original” image above, it isn’t that it’s showing a very small one, but that it isn’t showing at all, which I hypothesize is why changing the minimum length isn’t affecting it; the way it is being hidden entirely seems to be “overriding” that. HMMMM.
I’ll try to see if I can get a “minimal reproduction” of that behavior later.
Quite possibly that’s it; this is currently crossing a page break, which may be forcing the issue from Dorico’s POV. I haven’t done any manual engraving work on the score yet, though, so it’s still surprising to me!
Chris, this is crucial information, if you work with Dorico.
The percentage has to stay beneath (or at) 100%.
If it’s over 100% “anything can happen”.
So that should always be the first thing to check (even before posting on the forum…).
Ahhh, okay, this is good to know. I’m now looking through the score and finding that all of the pages in this movement (and probably the others ) are over-full!
I’m now poking around the forum and otherwise online to see what the likely causes are, but I’ll go ahead and ask here as well: What should I be looking at in Layout Options and Engraving Options? I’m assuming that it isn’t anything I’ve done manually in the Engraving mode, because (a) as far as I know I haven’t done anything manually and (b) perhaps more importantly, it is every single page.
(Thanks, as always, to helpful folks here on the forum!)
@jesele, I’ll see if I can extract just a page or two here!
Chris, both overfull indicators also work together, they are not really separate entities. Once they go over 100% you force Dorico into a conflict with your Layout Options.
I ungrouped the dynamics, deleted the pianissimo, shortened the diminuendo after the piano, and inserted the pianissimo on the fourth beat using the caret and Dynamics popover.
Yep, that works! There is still a question, of course, is what the “right place” is! Dorico’s own approach here would seem to agree with me that the pp technically belongs to the next bar, because selecting the second half note and using the popover and typing >pp produces the original output (that’s how it got there), and that’s how I have written hundreds of other such diminuendos in this same score; this is the only one notated this way, which suggests there is something odd going on here. I find it most likely that I have done something odd myself to get here, but I’d like to understand it so I can fix it with my (and Dorico’s?) preferred placement of this notation.
I would think that since there is no music in the third bar in your example, there’s nothing in that bar to attach the pp to, so Dorico puts the dynamic where there actually is written music. I entered a note in the third bar of the first example you posted, and the pianissimo moved immediately under the new note, and the hairpin is “fixed”.
If the desired effect is that the D in bar 2 ends on a pianissimo dynamic, then the dynamic has to be placed within that bar, not the empty bar afterwards.
I understand, but this is not a requirement in general for this, and you can see that there’s something slightly unusual going on by comparing how Dorico notates this in my example project vs. how it notates it if you create a whole note at the start of the bar and use the popover and enter >pp on that whole note. In that case, it will render it similarly to the effect you’re achieving by shortening the diminuendo and placing the pp later in the bar, but it does it automatically. Indeed, if you simply delete the preceding crescendo and p you’ll see that it updates the notation to match what your approach does!
The earlier suggestion from @jesele to set a minimum length for hairpins would seem to be related, but also didn’t actually fix things here. And it gets weirder! If I set that value to a minimum of 12, it is clearly having an effect by stretching out the space as if it is rendering that hairpin with the minimum number of spaces… but invisibly!
Yeah, that’s a good suggestion. Alas, I already tried that one as well, and it doesn’t help. It changes the rendering as you would expect… but only if I delete the pp. The hairpin remains invisible otherwise.
Ah, the full invisibility looks to be a function of whether I have “Hide hairpins shorter than minimum length” toggled. Still odd that it gets computed as being shorter than the minimum length regardless of what the minimum length is set to, though!
Even setting it to an absurd value of 40, which does affect all the other hairpins in the score, isn’t prompting this one to show up at all.
) are over-full!
