i’m writing a concerto for cello and 9 players. in the 2nd movement, there is a scordatura change for the solo cello only (the c and g strings being tuned up a quarter sharp). how do i do this in dorico?
This completely depends on how you want to notate it and whether you’re concerned with playback. I’d say there is mainly two approaches:
- The tabulature approach – in this case notating everything to be played on the lowest strings a quartertone lower than the sounding pitch. This way the relation between fingering and notation stays consistent with non-scordatura.
- The concert pitch approach – having every notated pitch being consistent with the actual produced pitch. Might be less intuitive since the notation will be inconsistent with the non-scordatura fingering (but different players will have different preferences, so there’s no saying what’s better or worse).
If you’re only concerned with notation and don’t care about playback, both approaches are very straight forward provided that you’re fluent with Dorico’s tonality system feature.
If you care about playback, the concert pitch approach is the only approach that will work natively. If this is the case and you desire to go with the tabulature approach anyway, I would probably make a separate hidden cello player only for the playback and mute the one containing the notation. It’s also possible to adjust the pitches in Play mode with pitchbend messages, but personally I find it painfully tedious to do that, so I would recommend the hidden player approach for the tabulature approach if playback is necessary.
Could one use a custom key signature?
Do you mean for only raising the notes from e.g. C2 to C#3? AFAIK custom key signatures in Dorico can only presume octave equivalence, meaning different fixed accidentals for different octaves is not possible. Not to mention that most notes can be played on different strings, meaning that you must presume you always play notes higher or equal to D3 only on the highest strings.
no need for playback, produced pitch is good. but i need something like saint saens did in danse macabre.
I wouldn’t call this a scordatura.
A quarter sharp means slightly raised notes.
You can notate “normal” and just add the quarter sharp accidentals.
This is, if your cellist performs it on a real instrument.
Only if you want Dorico to play back the quarter tone accidentals, you would have to switch to a different tuning system for that project.
You notate everything on the C and G a quarter flatter than you expect it to sound. But you must be careful to specify which strings to use throughout.
I think you could write the whole passage ‘at pitch’ and then transpose it down using the shift-I popover, but I’ve not tried that with 24-EDO tonalities.
(Also consider how the player is suppose to retune mid-piece, or specify they need two instruments)
Is this what you are looking for:
AFAIK, this is not natively supported (but can of course be mimicked with text, music or graphics frames).
Yes:
This is a real scordatura. The top string tuned down half a step (to get the “devil’s interval” between the two top strings). This has nothing to do with quarter tone music.
Not so. Any re-tuning is scordatura.
(The notes are notated as normal, but they sound transposed)
I would argue that all de-tuning of strings away from the standard fifths on a violin/viola/cello instrument is scordatura, if it needs a different way of notation for the player. So at least a half note de-tune (or more).
Scordatura was a quite common technique to expand the technical possibilities and the sound of f.e. a violin, like in Biber’s “rosary” sonatas.
Also a string instrument like a viola d’amore would “suffer” a lot of different scordaturas for different repertoire. (I had my viola d’amore tuned in c-Minor chord for Biber partita and St. Johns passion). Or at D-Major chord for some Vivaldi or classical repertoire. Also special scordaturas, for example Telemann trio sonata as “a d e a d”. Sounds weird, but is actually very practical. And heaps of others. The Leopold Mozart quote “this instrument suffers a lot of Verstimbung”, not meaning that the instrument would sound out of tune, but instead uses a lot of different scordaturas/ is tuned in a lot of different ways.
The way to notate the music for the players was handled in quite a number of different, pragmatic ways. One was to notate the music, as if it was played on a regular tuned instrument.
Which is what the OP wants! The players plays as usual and the notes sound different because of the tuning change.
(Why are you making a meal of this?)
Because I think strings being tuned a quarter note sharp do not need a different notation— and should not be called “scordatura” in the traditional meaning.
Playing a string instrument is a very practical thing and should not be overcomplicated.
Except that it is scordatura in the traditional meaning.
In the OPs case the C and G strings will sound a perfect 5th, but a quartertone sharp. Neither of us knows what the actual music looks like, so why make assumptions?
guys, i decided not to use the scordatura. im taking a different approach for the movement.
30 Tem 2026 Per 23:39 tarihinde Janus <notifications@steinberg.discoursemail.com> şunu yazdı:
Depending on different factors, “real-world” string players won’t tune the instrument in perfect 5ths anyway = slightly narrower than pure intervals.
Just saying…
(A cello player could chime in here).
But just a tiny tiny fraction of a quarter note! In a microtonal tonal kontext I am not sure that they would use that way of tuning the fifths anyway. Interesting subject though!
It depends. If you tune to a keyboard which is tuned in mean-tone, these notes are extremely sharp.
Sure, but I think that’s something else. I thought you were talking about how string quartets shrink their fifths even when no keyboards with fixed intonation are involved.
And if I have the maths right, 1/4 SC is around 5-6 cents and a quarter note 50. So a big difference.
The Ligeti Violin Concerto (amongst others I’m sure) uses microtonal scordatura for some of the orchestral string players. In his case, all four strings are tuned slightly lower to imitate the 5th and 7th natural harmonics.