Hi experts. The lower staff here is the “source” of the rhythmic cues in the upper staff. Should I consider this alignment acceptable (I think not)? There are three places in the chart with the same contents, and the alignment is identical. The chart has been open and closed many times over several days so “restart” does not help. And how can I get the last note (first beat of 57) to be part of the cue? The beat was selected when executing the cue.
No, the rhythmic alignment’s not acceptable.
As far as Dorico’s concerned, you have two voices at the same rhythmic position so they can’t automatically overlap; one voice gets offset. There doesn’t seem to be an exception made for rhythmic cues, at least at the moment.
You can bypass the behaviour, though. Select just the real notes in the upper staff, either by selecting the passage and then deselecting the cue label, or by selecting a single real note and then using Select More. Then, in Engrave mode, set the Voice Column Index property to 0. In fact, when you turn on the Voice Column index property it will likely default to 0.
Yes! That worked. I am happy that I only had three places to go in and change this parameter.
What about the missing cue note?
If the slash region was already there, the beat wasn’t selected (highlighting a beat of a slash region is not the same thing as highlighting the stave underneath it, which is what you’d need to be able to do).
Select the cue then type Shift-Alt-Right until the note appears in bar 57. You might then need to turn on the “Hide rests around cue” property.
OK there were really some needs here which made this process not so easy, but yes now it works. Thanks.
Is there no way to simply move the rhythmic cues up a little? I could move the text and the beams up, but not the cue notes themselves.
On edit, the Distance property works. I didn’t see it because it was off the screen to the right.
While we’re commenting on this … What is the use of a rhythmic cue that exactly matches the rhythm in the staff?
Well first of all it might be clearer that the musicians who are supposed to play rhythmic have it clear on “their staff” what to play instead of having to read the main staff. Secondly, this was an example. In other parts the main staff does not have the exact same rhythm. The reason for choosing these particular measures was that even if the rhythm is the same, the horisontal alignment became bad, which was the essence of the question.
Try this:
Select the rhythmic cue, open the Properties panel, click on Distance and enter a value (say, 3 or more) - this should move the rhythmic cue upwards. If my hunch is correct, the alignment of the rhythmic cue with the normal notes should change when there is a bit more vertical space between them.