In the marimba part, as from the third bar from this fragment, I have two voices (right and left hand). First of all, I believe that the RH stem going up, the LH stems going down, and the half rest under the RH notes on the third and fourth beat demonstrate that two voices were indeed assigned.
Now I want the left hand to play ff and the right mf. My notation as it is, is not satisfying. The player has to think twice to understand “ff only lower voice” and still doesn’t get the information about the dynamic of the upper voice.
This is what I tried. First I removed the “ff lower voice only”, than I activated the notes of the upper voice and typed Shift+N to activate the carret. The image hereunder shows this.
I see the dotted line going down toward the centre of the staff, which already makes me wonder…
But I repeated the procedure for the lower voice: activating, Shift+N, Shift+D, typing ff:
I’m working in Windows. I guess your Alt+Opt is my Alt+Ctrl. Well I tried that also. And it didn’t work. BUT THEN…
I typed Shift+D in carret mode, wrote ff in the proper field, AND clicked on that small ‘person-icon’ in the right side of this field, and then Enter. It worked! Herunder the result, after placing both dynamics a bit closer to the staff in Engrave mode.
And afterwords, after tapping a few times Ctrl+Z, to remove the ff, I repeated the procedure, but this time without entering the carret mode. And that worked as well!
So I wonder why the manual, on page 1247 says: “You can only input voice-specific dynamics when the caret is active, such as during note input.” Could this be to here the right dynamic when playing the music? Since I first made the demo in Cubase, I use Dorico only for scoring, so I couldn’t tell…
I also wonder why the manual doesn’t mention this small ‘person-icon’, or maybe I didn/t find where this is explained…
Oh yes, I found this on page 395 of the manual. But strangely, when adding dynamics in this field without clicking on this little icon, it is still been written. Probably I forgot this 4th step in time and just opened the field (Shift+D) wrote the dynamic and tapped Enter. It seemed to work.
This makes me wonder if indeed this has to do with making the dynamics audible in playback… And still I wonder why Dorico asks to enter the dynamic with active carret…
What am I missing when entering them without the carret being active?
When you enter dynamics without the caret visible, the dynamic will always be assigned to the whole staff. It only knows which voice to use when you hold Alt/Opt when it can take that information from the voice of the caret.
As I expected. Thanks, dear Daniel, for making me sure about this. And I have a specific question/suggestion for you.
Searching for an answer about voice-specific dynamics in the 2000 pages counting manual, I performed a search query for “voice-specific dynamics”, as one would expect, and I arrived at page 1247. But the answer is not there. Apparently one can find it on page 395… well, more or less, because on this page, “voice-specific dynamics” is not spcifically mentioned. Honestly, this is by far not easy for a user, who didn’t study the manual from a to z, and even then… So here’s my question.
Is it possible to alter the manual in this regard, or at least to add a clear link on page 1247 towards page 395? The excisting reference (I quote: “Input methods for dynamics on page 392”) made me think that page 392 only concerned how to input general dynamics… Working towards a deadline, withheld me from checking out every related link. And even then, I might still not have been able to connect the one with the other.
I count myself lucky that this forum exists and that there are so many people who (very quickly!) come to the rescue…
I tend to use the on-line Help pages, as they are likely the most up-to-date resource. Even so, finding the way to adding voice-specific dynamics was not immediately clear in the left-hand results column.
