Regarding Rehearsal Marks

Showing/hiding an accidental is really easy: there is a switch with options in the properties panel at the bottom.

To give you three general rules of thumb that will help you a ton (I suspect, any way):

  1. Look for things in the properties panel at the bottom of the window; there are a wealth of options available here. This is context dependent too, so it will change depending on what you have highlighted.
  2. when it comes to notes & beams, if there’s something you want to accomplish, it’s more than likely possible; right click and look at the options available in the menus that pop up on screen.
  3. If there is something that you need to happen consistently, odds are there is a setting in either engraving or layout options. If you cant find it, pop on here and ask and one of us will have a response for you—usually within minutes.
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I change courtesy accidentals enough that I’ve found it helpful to assign a shortcut key to toggle accidental visibility.
Stew

Yep - there’s a really handy one that scrolls round all the different accidental visibilities.

Thanks for sharing this, it’s always helpful to get this sort of feedback as the manual is there to support users working on real projects!

If you’ve got a few concrete examples to hand of instances where you’ve not been able to find the relevant part of the documentation, I’m always happy to hear about those - sometimes it’s a matter of extra caveats needing to be added, sometimes it’s more to do with adding links to topics from other places, and sometimes there are alternative keywords I can add.

Just for those examples you’ve already given -

  • Changing the stem direction of selected notes is here. Information is segmented in Steinberg manuals, but if you scroll down the list of topics on the left, you should see that this topic is underneath the broader introduction to “Stem direction” and there are nearby related tasks that tell you how to do different things with/about stem direction. To the best of my ability, this is how the manual is structured - introductions at a higher level with specific actions underneath as a cluster. At the bottom of each page, there are usually related links to other topics, and navigation to the previous/next topics with the relevant title shown too.
  • Courtesy/cautionary accidentals - these are governed by default by the accidental duration rule. You can hide/show/parenthesize accidentals on an individual basis too.

Thanks for chiming in Lillie – it means a lot.
The big challenge I face is that when you don’t know how to do something in Dorico (name your new program) you don’t know what to call it and you don’t know where it “lives” in the program. So we have become accustomed to using search in fora and in the manuals. – and old time sibelius this was the way I figured out how to use that program.

With dorico, i find it much more challenging to get productive search results in the documentation. For example, some of today/yesterday search strings:
flip note stem direction
manually change stem direction
manually resolve collisions
move rehearsal mark
manually move music symbol
move instrument to different player (trying to figure out how to collapse imported flow instruments into one single player – still haven’t figured that out)
moving instruments between players
hide instrument name
instrument names in staff labels (the search never did really get me to this solution – i had found it accidentally and then found it accidentally again, but search did not get me there).
save layout settings for new file (i.e. can i make a template or export a layout = answer found in forum here).

I 100% understand that the answer to all of these questions is … “you just go here and do this.” I know that as I learn about where to look for things my hunches will get better, but it’s very steep as a learning curve and there is an opacity to the search in the documentation that is more challenging than in most software I’ve learned to take on.

for example, if you want to know “how to hide an accidental” (because you can’t make it go away by just clicking on it a la sibelius) , there is very little intuitive way to know that what you really need to be looking for is the “accidental duration rule.” of course it makes sense once you know how it works, but hiding and showing is not something I would naturally associate with duration, so there’s no way I’d ever even think to use it in a search query.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Dorico. It’s just a big challenge to get to understand how it thinks.
thanks much, jake

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I don’t mean to dump a load of work on Lillie and her staff, but perhaps (somewhere in the future) starting “How To” articles in the manual with the words “How to” would help users differentiate between concept or overview articles from those that actually give instructions.

E.g.How to Change Step Direction” vs. “Changing Stem Direction”
I know it’s a bit more wordy, but it’s a thought to consider in the future.

I’m also finding that the word “segno” turns up no results in the search, and neither do “fine,” DC al fine or any related terms. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to insert a segno symbol into my score. (nevermind change the size of the one that exists). I’m sure this is blindingly obvious to everyone else in this thread but it’s just not obvious how to do this simple, essential music writing task here. j

I suspect you’re using an out-of-date version of the manual. You need to be using the Dorico 3.5 manual, here: Dorico Help

Ah … so … this thing called steinberg.help is not where you’re supposed to go?? How is a person supposed to be able to figure that out?? I know that there is a lot to be said for sleek graphic presentation, but there is nothing at the link here below that would give me any idea that I was not in the correct place. The version you linked to indicates that it is the 3.5 manual – but in the one I have been looking at there is nothing there at all that would let you now that it only applies to a much older version of the software.

No wonder I’ve been going out of my mind trying to figure out extraordinarily simple things – I just want to search for familiar, easy music terms and have that get me to the part of the documentation that shows how to work with those things. — none of those terms appear to be indexed into the dorico help documentaton i’ve been looking at. Could someone possibly ether make it go away or add some instructions to say v. 2.0 and below??

https://steinberg.help/dorico/v1/en/search.html?searchQuery=segno

Steinberg.help absolutely is the correct place to go.
Once you’ve searched for Dorico or clicked Dorico in the product family below, you have to tell it which version of Dorico you’re using.

Don’t click the wrong one or you’ll get out-of-date results.

And no, somebody can’t make them go away, because there are still people using older versions of the software. The development team are well aware of the problem with search engines promoting older, more historically popular search results ahead of more recent (up-to-date) results, and have said they’re working on it. I suspect if it were a simple case of flicking a switch they would have done it by now, though.

With the exception of Dorico 1 (which was just called “Dorico”) the top left corner of every page of the manual has a version number. The URL also contains a version number - see how the link you’ve just posted has “v1” between “/dorico/” and “/en/”?


Some kind of sign that this is the 1.0 version would help others avoid the issues I have been facing. There are no links here to get you to newer versions. That must be something that could be remedied??

and yes, now I know that the url says v.1, but who reads urls when you’re doing a search??

also – i never found an option to select a product.

and yes, I realize I’m being bullheaded about this, but I’ve literally spent hours today and yesterday trying to work things out on my own, only to be stymied again and again in finding a solution for a basic function. Now I’m trying to get two eighth notes to become a quarter note and an utterly defeated. I don’t think I can face it until tomorrow.

I entirely agree. I don’t work for Steinberg and I have no control over how the documentation works: you asked how someone’s supposed to know what version they’re looking at, and I’ve given you an answer that hopefully helps you (though granted, not anyone that doesn’t stumble on this thread).

Select the first eighth note and type 6 - the shortcut for a quarter note. If they’re currently two eighth notes tied together, you’ll either need to rejig your Notation Options or use Force Duration.

I do appreciate your help very much. it seems to be that because the quarter note crosses a beat it really really really wants it to be two eighth notes with a tie.


I’ll try what you suggest.

I am much obliged. I feel like I’m trying to drive an audi sportscar with the knowledge of a vw bus owner. – totally different skill set.

yeah … typing six makes a single 8th into two 8ths with a tie. I’m sure it’s a regular thing and useful in most cases, but we’re trying to reproduce a handwritten ms. anyway, i’ll let it go for now.

Gotcha. There may be something in Notation Options (Cmd/Ctrl-Shift-N) > Note Grouping that fixes this particular situation globally. Read those options carefully as they’re quite specific about which time signatures they apply to etc.

To fix locally, select either of the tied notes (it’ll automatically select both), then click the G clamp in the left panel or type O to turn on Force Duration. You then need to shorten the note to a single note value that’s legal per the Notation Options - in this case 5 for an 8th. Then immediately type 6 and you should have a forced quarter note. Much quicker to do (O56) than to explain!

oooooohhhhh . a hack. great lemme try that. It’s just a thing that’s happening a bunch in this one tune – one of 20, so I don’t know that i want to mess with the global settings (that’s terrifying to contemplate). thanks much – I’ve been fiddling with the force duration clamp thingy, but hadn’t sussed quite how it works yet. thank you!!!

huzzah!!! works! :tada: :confetti_ball: :tada:

It’s quicker if you use it actually during note input, assuming you’re doing regular step time input (that’s either pitch before duration or duration before pitch, e.g. not live midi recording). Just hit O to toggle Force Duration before you input the note.

Try to get into the habit of toggling it back off when you’re done, though - on the whole the automated note splitting thing is really helpful (particularly when inputting long notes that span multiple beats/bars).

Yes – thanks very much for the tip. the project I’m doing is taking volunteer-derived music .xml of individual tunes (like 2-3 part dance tunes) and giving them a consistent formatting, a little graphic pizzazz and working with a small proofreading team to make a first editing pass to make sure the tunes comport with what’s in the MS> it is a very unusual way to do things, and I’ve got tunes coming in from muse score, sibelius, finale – and all of the special ways they render music .xml. The good news is that Dorico is on the whole quite good at doing that, but what I’m running into is notes that were entered not just by another person, but in a different programs – so there’s all variety of little tweaks that need to be made to get it sorted. (we asked for pdf version of volunteer digitized tunes so that we have a visual reference of what it was supposed to look like when they finished).

You might try experimenting with the settings at Preferences (Cmd-comma on Mac or Ctrl-comma on Win) > MusicXML Import.

If you leave everything in there ticked you’ll be fighting the MusicXML export capabilities of the source software, or of your colleagues/volunteers (though the bulk of this stuff can be reset to Dorico defaults by selecting all and going Edit > Reset Appearance, Edit > Reset Position and Edit > Beaming > Reset Beaming).

If you untick stuff in there you may lose some of the idiosyncrasies of the source material/software but you’ll only be fighting Dorico’s defaults (many of which can be changed).

Note that Notation Options are flow-specific, though there’s a Save As Default button in the dialog and you can select multiple flows in the right hand side of the dialog before updating settings.