Revisiting squiggly lines

Dorico
1

Last month I opened a thread about inserting wavy lines that look more or less hand-scrawled, items for which there is no obvious Dorico technique.

Someone described chaining together multi-segment slurs. This seemed to work until I found one where the next object in a series was a rest, and Dorico won’t slur a note to a rest (for good reasons!).

To my surprise, I found passable ways to make this work fairly well in playback, which was not initially a primary requirement, until I discovered NotePlayer, so now I’m also hoping to get reasonably good playback. I’ve been more successful with this than I expected.

But I’m still not satisfied with what I have written. I’m fine-tuning the graphical details in Engrave Mode now, and am hoping to find solutions for things I wasn’t initially satisfied with.

I’ve included below two Screenshots from someone else’s music taken from YouTube. The composition is a work called “AYRE: TOWED through plumes, thicket, asphalt, sawdust and hazardous air I shall not forget the sound of” by Chaya Czernowin, and it was published by Schott Music in 2016.

wavy1
wavy1774×162 28 KB

wavy2
wavy21550×410 59.3 KB

My point in including these is that I know Dorico is surely the best music notation software in existence and is capable of rendering whatever a composer wants. I’m sure this score predates the existence of Dorico, but somehow they managed to get squiggly lines in it. There’s actually a fair amount of it in this score, including thick ones in the piano part.

Since I’m simultaneously trying to learn Dorico and resurrecting a 60-year-old challenging composition of my own, I’m learning each step as I go for the first time. In the process, I’ve been listening to a lot of “new music” (allegedly avant-garde classical music) with scores for the first time in a long time, and I’m seeing some of the extended techniques composers are using.

Most innovations I think I could figure out how to do in Dorico. However, I’m still stumped on how to do the squiggly lines that look handwritten.

I could post another example from my own handwritten score if anyone cares. Fortunately, there’s not a lot of it to deal with, only a bar or two or three at a time in about three spots.

2

Maybe you can add a note in another voice, slur to it, and hide notehead and stem?

3

Would adding a layer in Adobe Illustrator to the Dorico PDF and creating the artwork there be an option?

4

I know nothing about Adobe Illustrator. I assume it’s a part of their large package of graphics editing software, which I’ve only heard about, including that it was quite expensive. That was 25 years ago. I doubt if it’s any less so today.

5

You can also use the recently released free Affinity software.

3 Likes
8

Thank you to everyone who has put up with my limitations so far. I sensed a bit of edginess to some recent responses and then noted that a couple of posts have been removed. I apologize if anything I said sounded confrontational or critical. That was not my intent.

By way of background: I’m an old guy (82) and a lifetime musician, but I’ve made the bulk of my living in other ways for a long time. I left grad school (studying music composition) to pursue a rock band I founded. (The band was started about two weeks before Sgt. Pepper was released. You never heard of me, but I was “fame adjacent” for a while.)

Personal circumstances made it wise for me to drop out of professional composition and performance. For years I made the bulk of my living doing music “engraving” using pre-computer music typewriter and hand finishing techniques, which I did part-time while I was still in school. Later I worked as a software engineer for Motorla and others and have been computer literate since about 1982 (the days of the Timex Sinclair).

Today music is my avocation. I know a lot but not everything. I used Finale for scores for about 25 years. When they went out of business, I accepted the deal they had for people to make the switch to Dorico. So here I am.

As a longtime advocate of open source, I’m aware there are programs such as Musescore and Lilypond, but don’t know much about either one. (I have Musescore, used to have Lilypond.) I don’t have time to delve into them. I know nothing about Adobe’s package of graphic editing software, and I’m one of the few people who has rarely had to work on computers running Microsoft operating systems. (I was all Unix and Linux until about 2001. macOS is Unix under the hood.)

Six or eight weeks ago I decided to see if I could get the hang of Dorico. I tend to learn new software quickly. After a month of work I have a challenging score almost done, but I’ve been unable to find satifying solutions for one problem, namely how to put in what look like hand-drawn squiggly lines.

Someone suggested maybe Adobe Illustrator would help. As I said, I don’t have or know Adobe Illustrator. Someone else suggested Affinity, which is free.

My question at this point is this: Say I get Affinity and learn how to draw scribbly lines with it – would I be doing that on top of a PDF of my score or operate it as a plug-in to draw within Dorico itself (which would be ideal)? Obviously, precise placement of the objects created would be an issue, especially if the layout should happen to shift even a little bit in places where I need it.

9

I can only speak for Adobe Illustrator, and I would

– make sure all music is in place

– export music in Dorico as PDF

– ‘split’ the PDF into individual pages

– open a page that requires ‘artwork’ in Illustrator

– draw the ‘artwork’ in a separate layer

– save as PDF again

– merge all individual files back to one PDF, possibly with a front matter and back matter material.

(I would probably save the artwork files as .ai for future updates.)

2 Likes
10

The short answer to your problem would probably be somewhere along the terms “Dorico is not suited (yet) for this kind of notation”. I’ve been spending some time to finish a work for a composer who uses special techniques for strings, and I think I’ve spent more time building those specific glyphs than copying the music in Dorico. And those glyphs were really redundant (meaning I could find a pattern to use an elementary glyph to build a line repeating that glyph).
The illustrator solution (or Affinity designer, free) is of course the way to go, but it’s out of Dorico. You can’t expect NotePerformer to follow any of this, since it’s a PDF document you’re working with, and not a Dorico one any more.
I don’t know if a “free shapes tool” is in the works, or even a project, for the Team. Until it’s there, third party program to finish the job is the only way to go, if I understand correctly.

2 Likes
11

Thanks @MarcLarcher. I’ve marked your comment as a “solution” mainly to help the forum administrators to keep track of issues, which is the point. “Can’t do that” is a valid response to a question or request.

Meanwhile, I’ve finished the project I’ve been working on for a long time, including cover, performance instructions, appendices, and exported PDF and WAV files. It’s been an excellent learning experience for me.

Regarding notation and NotePerformer on the wavy line sections: I found approximate workarounds in all cases, and though they aren’t perfect, they suffice for now. I’m not going to bother with Affinity.

Furthermore, when I first sketched in notation in these places, I was able to use it. I went to the MIDI Pitch Bend controller, where there is a Draw tool, and was able to bend those notes in what are actually not-horrible approximations of what I want. Those sounds remained the same regardless of what kind of kinky stuff I did to the notation afterwards.

I’ve decided that this work well enough for the time being. It’s time to move on.

I’ll probably let if ferment for a couple of days before really moving on. I almost forgot to plow through the Proofreading points. There are quite a few I disagree with, but that’s another issue. No doubt I’ll think of or see other nits I’ll want to adjust, but nothing major.

This forum provides amazing support. I truly appreciate the responses I’ve gotten in my relatively short time working with Dorico, which I can now say that I’m comfortable using.

1 Like