"On edit, I got around the problem by giving the guitar player two instruments: a comping instrument that is entirely rhythmic slash notation and a melody instrument that has normal notation. This works fine – and in that case, I did use the Voices → Rhythmic Slashes command to set the entire comping track to rhythmic notation.
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Hello Cparmerlee,
When you have a chance, could you send a little example of how you did it, i.e. a sample Dorico file. I tried and I end it up with two staves, so I definitely did not follow correctly what you suggested.
I sent you the file on a private message. In the score, it is two staves. But it automatically drops down to one staff in the part layout. I didn’t do anything special to make that happen. In the part, Dorico inserts instrument change instructions. I hid those (actually changed the instruction to a blank.)
The cras you have experienced when trying to change existing notes into a slash voice is fixed in the forthcoming update. I’m sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime.
That was for a rather unusual octet that performs mostly at senior centers. It was formed by a trombone player, so it has 4 trombones, one utility reed player, guitar, bass and drums. (The woodwind player has to cover alto, tenor, clarinet and flute.) That’s actually quite a versatile collection, but there are no commercial arrangements for such an ensemble. The founder wrote a book of about 120 charts covering all kinds of music. But there wasn’t a single march in the book (unless you count Saints or 76 Trombones). No polkas either, so I guess I’ll have to do Beerbarrel or something.
Here’s a sample.
About that Sousa march (Sempre Fi), somebody had done a painstakingly accurate MIDI rendition of the Sousa original. I was able to bring that directly into Dorico and from there mostly just cut and paste. I was surprised at how well Dorico handled the MIDI.
Thank you for sharing the Rhythm 8 Band videos, I enjoyed listening.
Regarding importing MIDI into Dorico, I have the same experience, a very pleasant one. Dorico does a great job importing MIDI. I also had great results importing XML.
This finally looks correct, but then the music won’t play back.
It seems intuitive to me to select a few bars and say “New Up-Stemed Voice” and have just those few bars have the unstemmed voice, not the entire line. And the music underneath the up-stemmed voice needs to play.
Unless I’m missing something, this is exactly how it works. But you need to make sure you use the options under Edit > Voices > Change voice, and not the other options in the Edit > Voices menu (these will change the attributes of the entire voice).
You also need to make sure that Playback options (cmd/ctrl + shift + p) > Repeat > Play slash voices is activated.
You are correct. I missed the (not too obvious) need to “change voice” rather than “edit/Voices”. And it seems like “Play slash voices is activated” should be the obvious default, but it’s not.
I know this is a long dead thread, but is there an easy way to mix normal noteheads and slash notes without using multiple voices? I’d love to just be able to select a bunch of notes in a measure change them to rhythm slashes without creating a mess of rests. This whole separate voices thing just creates more work when trying to make jazz/pop charts with mixed notation…
Ok so I figured out a workaround with start voice/end voice, but it only works on the first bar, when this figure comes back, the switch for start voice doesn’t work so I can’t get rid of that first 8th rest above the chord…
If you’re going to be mixing it up like that, I put a note on the middle line and change the notehead to a slash notehead, it plays back a B but I don’t really mind that. If there’s lots of bars of slashes then I use slash regions…
Select the whole bar and then go Edit > Remove Rests. This actually sets the same Starts Voice/Ends Voice properties under the hood but saves you the hassle of calculating to which notes and rests those properties should be applied.
