Slur placement with multiple voices

In the attached example, I’m trying to put simple slurs on the pairs of notes in the lower voice, as in the first group; this was dragged by hand, as Dorico’s default placement is above the other voice, as in the second and third groups. In a long passage, it’s a pain to have to drag every single slur, and the results aren’t going to be even. Any way of getting the placement how I want it as default?

No, I’m afraid there’s no way to get that kind of placement by default. Those are what we call “inner slurs”, i.e. slurs that need to be positioned between notes either in the same or different voices but not on the outermost noteheads or stems/beams on either side of the staff. Unfortunately it’s very hard to position those automatically given the current design of our slur processors, so for the time being you have to position them by hand. Try to use techniques like doing one bar, then copy and paste, using Lock Duration to change the pitches of the notes; hopefully then the amount of adjustment required to the copied slurs will only be modest.

That’s a shame; in this particular example the default slurs don’t make any musical sense, but I see the general problem…

I did try cutting the top line, inserting the slurs, then re-pasting top line; but when I paste, the slurs immediately jump to the “wrong” position again. Maybe some means of locking them (before pasting) would be some sort of solution?

Anyway, I’ll try the method you suggest!

I don’t have any problem getting these slurs where you want them.

Select just the first note (as in the picture), press S to create the slur and F to flip it.

Maybe you are doing something different to select the slur position, or you changed some other engraving options?
inner slur.png

No, that makes no difference for me. Whether I select one note of the pair or two, and either hit S or click on the slur button, the resulting slur appears over the top voice. Haven’t done anything else to the slur position and am not conscious of changing engraving options (spacings etc). I don’t know how you get that result!

Well now, but here’s a weird thing: if I create a third voice on the stave, and paste the second voice notes into that, I can then get the slurs as I want (as Rob’s example, above). Is there some rule in Dorico that alters slur behaviour in voices “more than one voice away”? It’s not intuitive…!

I just started a new empty project, added a viola instrument (for no particular reason except you had an alto clef, but that shouldn’t make any difference) and created the notes in two voices (one up-stem and one down-stem). No special tricks, otherwise I would have mentioned them.

The only reason I tried it was because I thought “I’m sure I’ve done this sort of thing before with no problems, despite what Daniel said”…

If you can attach the score that doesn’t work (delete everything except one bar and one staff if there are any copyright issues) somebody might figure out why its behaving different for you.

How was your score originally created - for example was it imported from MusicXML?

Also, are you running the latest version of Dorico (2.2.10) - though I don’t think anything relevant has changed in recent versions.

ToftCentrum, are you definitely working with one upstem voice and one downstem voice? If they’re both upstem or both downstem (with forced stem directions) then you might not be able to get what you want automatically.

Yes you’re right, Pianoleo: as I just discovered, slur placement depends on whether it’s an up- or-down-stem voice. An up-stem voice with inverted notes, whilst looking exactly like the same notes in a down-stem voice, is treated differently. Still not very intuitive, but at least it makes sense!

Thanks for the answers and sorry Rob to have sent you up all these other paths - much appreciated anyway.

No problem - solving puzzles is fun :wink: