Is it possible to set a default partial beam direction?
I find that dorico is natively beaming the wrong direction in the subdivisions according to my knowledge or at least likings for this particular rhythm.
For example: In 12/8, the first beat of the below example is what Dorico natively does on the 2nd note with the partial beam facing towards the second subdivision. In beat 2 of the below example, is how I’d like it to default which I believe is the correct way of subdividing the beam, but I had to manually set this with the properties panel on a per note basis.
To show, it does the same in 4/4 using triplets, with Dorico default in the 1st beat and my correction with the 2nd.
Is there a way to globally set this with an option as I can’t seem to find?
I disagree with you that Dorico gets this wrong. The subdivision of the beat in both of your examples is into three quavers (eighths) and the direction of the partial beam respects this.
Flipping the direction of the partial beam as you have done implies a duple subdivision of the beat: in 12/8, that’s two dotted quavers (dotted eighths); in the triplet, a 3+3 grouping would be correctly notated as a sextuplet of semiquavers (sixteenths).
So I don’t think Dorico will let you change the default in this way, but at least you can get there using a manual intervention.
I guess I was thinking about it wrong and appreciate you explaining and correcting my subdivisions. And, you answered my question too that Dorico can’t change by default so if I want to I’ll do it manually. But I guess Dorico is telling me their direction is correct so no need lol.
I’m with you on this one. If I were sight reading the first “correct” way that Dorico forces on us I’d stop and try and figure out what in the world was going on. I’ve got a situation where there is a 1/16, 1/32 then another 1/16 then another 1/32 (not triplets) all beamed together. It just looks funny to see the first 32nd beamed to the right.
I’d like to see an example in non-tuplets where this beaming is done in published material (say from Alfred or Hal Leonard as they are the biggest publishers). I think I’ve always seen it done the other way around, except for the first note (eg. 1/16 to dotted 1/8) but 1/8-1/16-1/8 the 16th should be beamed to the left.
Whether it is correct or not, I don’t really care. I want to do it the way I was taught to do it. I’m getting a little tired (after only 10 days of using Dorico) in having to constantly deal with situations that I find in all the music I’ve ever played that Dorico says is wrong and won’t (easily) do what I want. It seems rather arrogant for a software program to tell me I can only do it their way unless I’m willing to go through a million hoops to do it the way I’ve always seen it done. Resistance is futile. You will do it our way or suffer.
Dorico has defaults, just like all software, but it also provides (literally) thousands of options and overrides to allow you to customize the results to your tastes. It’s not arrogance that leads us to have our defaults set in a particular way, but rather necessity: the program has to do something sensible in every circumstance. It would be infeasible for it to stop and pop up a message every time you enter a note that could have a fractional beam and ask you to decide then and there which direction it should point in…
The missing piece in this specific case that prevents Dorico from achieving your preferred appearance by default is that you currently cannot specify what the beat grouping within a tuplet should be, so Dorico always uses a simple default beat grouping. Fractional beam direction, of course, is correctly determined by the position of the note relative to the prevailing beat grouping.
In the future we anticipate that you will be able to specify the beat grouping for a tuplet in a similar way to how you can do it for a time signature in the Shift+M popover, though I’m not sure when exactly this will come.
In any case, you can change the direction of a fractional beam by selecting the note on which the fractional beam appears and choosing Edit > Notations > Beaming > Set Partial Beam Direction > Set Partial Beam Direction Left/Right. You can assign key commands to these two commands, or access them very quickly via the jump bar. This seems like one step to me, rather than “a million hoops”.
