Hello,
I’m arranging a piece for piano where the sustain pedal reliably and repeatedly is down for one bar at a time. How should I enter a ‘sim.’ instruction after showing the pedalling in the first bar, and will this be recognised in playback?
Thanks
(V3.1.10.1032)
You can enter it as text or as a playing technique, but there’s not presently a way to make that be reflected in playback.
Here is a slightly different question - when I enter “sim.” as text, the text is always a little bigger than the Dynamic Music Text font, even though I have them both set to 10.0 (Playing Technique font is 11.0). Maybe I’m making a simple mistake?
sim-fragment.dorico.zip (626 KB)
If your “sim” is in relation to dynamics, you could input it as a dynamic “mf sim.” then hide the mf. If it’s in relation to “pizz/arco”, you can give playing techniques duration then change their continuation type to “sim”.
There’s no way for that instruction to be recognised consistently in playback, but I guess you can use a (or two consecutive) hidden Playing techniques which controls the CC 64 for every bar, and hide them. Or just draw the CC 64 manually in Play mode. But of course, this might be laborious, depending on the length of the piece.
If your “sim” is in relation to dynamics, you could input it as a dynamic “mf sim.” then hide the mf. If it’s in relation to “pizz/arco”, you can give playing techniques duration then change their continuation type to “sim”.
That’s fantastic, thank you!
Thank you, everyone! It seems the ‘sim continuation’ setting in the properties panel does not work, so I put it in as text as suggested - I assume this is a known issue. I suppose getting Dorico to decipher a ‘sim.’ instruction as a human musician would and play back accordingly would really be pushing the AI…
Are you sure that your pt has duration (when you select it, is there a continuation line?)
Apologies for re-opening an old thread…
The “sim.” option does not appear in the Continuation type drop down menu for me. I have a pedal marking with a continuation line selected.
What am I missing?
Thx
(Win 10 -Dorico 5)
Use these property settings …
I have in the past added simile as a Playing Technique (with a dummy playback technique) and then hidden the Pedal indications from that point on via the Properties Panel…
@Janus : Thanks - that worked. Curious though. One of the tutorials somewhere showed the “sim.” text as a drop-down option under Continuation Type. Was that perhaps removed in a subsequent version of Dorico? (I’m a long time Finale user who just switched and I’m trying to climb the learning curve…)
@Derrek : Thanks - that seems like a fair amount of work. Hmm…
That’ll be for general playing techniques. Pedal lines behave differently, so have their own set of properties.
And I suggest you spend as much time as possible in the foothills (ie using Dorico defaults) until you get really comfortable with the workflow, else it’s easy to get frustrated!
Ha! I thought I WAS in the foothills! 
Will soldier on…
The forum is littered with posts starting “I’ve used Finale for 20+ years…” then complaining about xyz. But it sounds like you are taking the sensible approach. Stick with it and good luck.
Another option to make Dorico play back with pedal without having visible notations in the music is to add appropriate points in the MIDI CC editor.
Funnily enough, I needed to do this recently for a project of my own, but couldn’t remember which CC was the sustain pedal; lo and behold, some past version of myself (clearly under expert instruction from Daniel) added this helpful information to the documentation, meaning I was able to go into the Key Editor, add a MIDI CC editor, select channel 64, and draw in the sustain pedal playback phrasing I wanted. Worked beautifully, especially being able to copy and paste easily the pattern of points that gave me the lifts I liked.
Lillie, that is very slick stuff! 
B.
Very Unfourtunate
Hi @Krish, the post you replied to is 5 years old.
Here is again (unifying some of the previous suggestions) a recapitulation of how to have a sim. for Pedal, and have the subsequent “hidden” Pedals maintain their playback:
write your pedals for the whole desired passage (if you want a sim. it is probably a repetitive passage with the same pedalling: you can use the shortcut R to repeat them):
select the Ped. where you want to have the sim. and set its properties as shown:
you can also customise the text Font, for Pedal lines, if desired:
select the subsequent Pedal Lines (you can select a range of bars and then right click and Filter for Pedal Lines), and set their properties as shown, all at once (activating also the Text property override but leaving it blank: Dorico will substitute them conveniently with a non printable signpost):
Dorico file example and Result:
Pedal sim. with correct playback.dorico (523.8 KB)
Thank You Very Much Dear
