Selecting, Copying & Pasting with tied notes

Hello community,

what is the most elegant way to deal with long tied notes if you want to to select parts of it.
Do i really have to untie everything first?

Does this thread help?

https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=246&t=148626&p=799164#p799164

If your goal is to have the same note copied but with a different rhythmic value, you could just type a new number after the paste.

Depends on what you want to accomplish by selecting.

If you want to assign playing techniques or dynamics to a specific position in the chain, you can do that by activating note input and moving the caret.

OK i will be a bit more specific:

I need the notes of this bar somewhere else in the piece. The tied ones, that are not selected now start some measures before, but i need them also in the pasting.
As the not selected notes are not selected they will not be copied. Do i really have to untie the notes or is there a secret weapon for this. Just remind, how many steps it takes to just copy this music and then bring back the source material to its initial state… Really?

I’m not in front of Dorico at the moment, but would the System track be helpful to select the tied note material?

Nope. You have to untie and retie in this situation. Internally, Dorico doesn’t see those notes as 4 beats tied to 4 beats tied to whatever; it sees a single note that’s 37 beats long that just happens to be grouped according to some grouping rules and some barlines.

There are great upsides to this way of doing things; this is basically the one downside.

What a bummer!

I need this quite often, in film music i need a specific portion of music longer (need not to be the end) or the pattern repeated 2 times more. As soon as there are tied notes involved i am just working out untieing and restoring.

PS: same with the system track, they won’t select

By the way, you know that you can untie quickly using the caret and U, right?

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It would be so helpful if the developers could enable System track staff selection to include tied notes for the duration of the bar, by detecting a tied note’s pitch and setting the duration to the bar’s duration for this common situation.

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One option is to copy the tied notes as they are and adjust their length after copy in the destination, so just pressing 8 in this case to fit one bar.

Thanks for that, quite useful!

Downside: it only works for one voice and you can’t just type T to glue them together again but you have to take your mouse clicking on the first note.

If you mean multiple voices in one staff that are both tied, you can of course just type U, V, U…

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Ah, ok, that’s right :wink:

But in the end i would love to just quickly select what i see without this sophisticated untie-change-voice-and-glue-back-together. Maybe with a modifier or via the system track, would be useful.

I’m just switching to Dorico now and encountering this situation. Is it still the case that you must untie a bunch of notes in order to copy paste measures? What are the upsides to this? It seems to slow down my workflow if I have to untie notes every time I want to copy paste a sub-selection of notes, or even just copy paste whole measures that involve tied-across-measure notes

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You can insert a bar at the point you want to break the ties and then immediately delete it. It will be only useful if you want to break all the ties, though.

There isn’t an explicit upside to your exact scenario, no. The point of how Dorico treats tied notes is that there are advantages and disadvantages to it, and the dev team believes (and I personally agree) that the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

So you might lose a little time in this case (honestly though… probably no more than 10 seconds?), but you gain far more time in other scenarios, like extending durations.

Here’s another scenario: I got this result by inputting dotted eighths. No need for ties or anything else. So there are advantages, you just have to bend to this way of thinking about ties, and adjust when needed!

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Thanks Xavier – I tried this, but it seems you can’t insert a bar in the middle of a tied note, so I’m not sure that I understand your suggestion.

Thanks Dan for sharing your thoughts

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Indeed you can. Select the barline and Shift-B, 1, Enter.

Hi Dan, when I do what you suggested, no barlines popover appears. If I select a notehead, the barlines popover appears at the beginning of the tied note series. If I select a barline, then click on the “barlines” icon on the right-hand Dorico menu, then choose Insert Bars > Start of selection, I can do what you suggested. Why is my popover not appearing when I press Shift-B after selecting a barline?

Do you have many staves? With a barline selected, the popover appears above the top staff of the system, even if it’s outside the window view.