slashes and articulation arrows

Hi all, I have 2 questions.

1-How can I put a slash on this figure to indicate that it is to be played as fast as possible?

2-Is there a way of having an actual arrow to indicate a gradual change from staccato to legato?

If you use two Playing Techniques and group them together (or enter them into the Shift-P popover as Staccato->Legato) then they will show with an actual arrow.

You’d need to fudge a custom playing technique together to give you a diagonal line, then position it manually.

I tried that but it didn’t work. Dorico stubbornly refuses to enter anything at all. I get nothing when I press enter.
Do I have to create custom playing techniques for legato and staccato?

If they don’t already exist, then yes. You can always use the star icon at the bottom left side of the Playing Techniques dialog to save them as default for use in other projects.

Thanks pianoleo!

A quick note to the developers of Dorico:

I don’t understand why Dorico refuses to input text that it doesn’t understand. I dislike the idea that I have to spend time creating a dozen playing techniques to add to Dorico. Even if I type something as abstract as “X->Y”, I think dorico should just print it regardless of whether or not it understands it. I personally have no problem with it not playing back, I just want to be able to write music quickly, and I find Dorico fighting against that in this respect.

At least give users the option of making Dorico accept texts that it doesn’t recognize. After all, it is a program worth $600.

Playing techniques are semantic. They have meaning attached to them. That’s why the popover has a finite number of input items it can parse.

If you want to type anything, use text.

I have no issues using regular text, but I just couldn’t get the arrow to pop up by using text.

SO is there no way to make the slashes I need besides just drawing a line and editing it in engrave mode?

What sort of slash are you wanting?

If you want grace notes, write grace notes. If you want full size notes that take the space of full size notes but you want a grace note slash, then yes, you’ll need to construct one as a playing technique and place it manually.

Oh I realized that I can just input grace notes and scale them to “normal” instead of “grace notes” in the properties panel, and scale the rests down to 1. I wonder how well Dorico will handle the spacing for this, especially if I want say, 20 grace notes in one bar.

Grace notes slash. But I want the notes to be full sized. I might end up having many grace notes in succession.

The spacing should be just fine. Worst case scenario, you do a little bit of manual note adjustment.

Indeed, so far Dorico has handled the spacing quite well. It is leaving space after the grace notes, but I don’t mind fixing that manually later.

Now I’m wondering if there’s a way to automatically place the grace notes on the beat (relative to the instruments that don’t have grace notes).

Hi Samiseif!
You cannot expect Dorico to place grace notes as grace notes in a certain situation and as normal notes in others, because there is no properties for this (and it is the first time I read such request). Grace notes are either before the note or before the barline.
Nothing prevents you from scaling down normal notes, and make abuse of hidden custom tuplets if need be, it has proved to be a very powerful tool.

Hi MarcLarcher

Having grace notes appear as normal notes but with slashes through them is not that unusual. A famous example is in a piece by Schwantner, you can see the score here:

To write something like this, I would need the slashes to be there, but also I would need the grace notes to appear on the beat. Otherwise, that would really ruin the horizontal distribution of the music to the point that it would be absurd, like in bar 2 in the example above.

Good ideas for workarounds, but I think my best bet here would be to use regular notes and manually place slashes and edit them in engrave mode.

I was wondering if beaming regular notes with grace notes would be able to fix that, but that didn’t work.

@SamiSeif have you find any solution? I have the same problem… :confused: I would like to link the slash to a stem automatically