Quarter notes crossing the beat?

I’m looking all over Notation Options but can’t find a way to have quarter notes crossing the beats in 12/8. I have hundreds of them so to fix all of them with Force Duration is not tempting.
Skärmavbild 2021-04-26 kl. 16.01.49

If this is just for a few players, you could use a local time signature just on those staves with the beat grouping specified (e.g. [2+2+2+3+3]/8 ); if everyone has these rhythms, a global time signature will apply to everyone.

Thanks, that was fast, unfortunately it happens over any beats, not just the first ones. And I don’t want to make the basic feel become 6, it has to stay 4.

You can of course adapt the beat grouping however you like, and wherever you like - and hide subsequent time signature changes with different beat groupings specified if necessary.

If you want the beat grouping to be such that Dorico doesn’t split at the traditional beat boundaries in 12/8 but you don’t want to handle it locally using force duration, this is probably the cleanest method.

Yes, your are probably right. I was hoping for a setting that gives me 3 against 2 in one go whenever I have quarter notes. Any of the other ways will mean a lot of fiddling.

Hang on, what is it exactly you want? Alternative beat grouping within the 12/8 time signature (as I understood from your initial post, which I took to mean you wanted the tied eighths to appear as a single quarter note) or tuplets/duplets, meaning two tuplet (duplet) eighths fill the space of 3 normal eighths?

I am pretty sure he wants the hemiola figures shown as three quarter notes rather than being split at the dotted-quarter beats.

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I hate to be That Guy, but this note grouping is not correct, and that’s why there’s no easy way to achieve it automatically. But that is the whole point of Force Duration… You can manually do whatever grouping you want.

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Thanks and yes I want the hemiolas shown as three quarter notes (or pause plus 2 or whatever), and yes, “That Guy”, I absolutely agree and I am of the opinion that dotted quarters are showing the beat and I personally want that to be evident in the score. BUT, when you have a lot of 3 against 2, it gets cluttered and many musicians are unhappy with that. And who wants unhappy musicians?

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and yes, I can use Force Duration, but there are many many places to apply it at.

Aha right yes 3 against 2 vertically rather than “horizontally”. If it’s worth anything, I often use single-staff time signatures in situations like this - it’s a much more flexible and top-down way of controlling note grouping (if you change your mind, you just need to delete the time signature rather than worrying about deactivating Force Duration for lots of individual notes) plus once you’ve input perhaps a pattern of time signatures with beat groupings across several notes on one staff, you can easily copy that to all staves that have the same pattern. But, ultimately as long as a method makes sense to you and gets what you need done, it’s probably fine :slight_smile: