Spacing of slashes

I’m officially switched to Dorico after 10 years on Finale. Couldn’t be happier.

Tonight I was playing around and tried to add some slashes to a drum set part. As you can see the bars aren’t uniform size - Dorico decided to make bar 16 smaller because of the spacing of some notation just above the image you see (part of the same system of course).


The attempt to put the slashes in the drum part was made after the note entry events during which Dorico resized the bars. This is a ‘Simple Drum Set’ percussion track.

Does anyone have an idea as to why the slashes are not uniformly distributed within bars 15,17 and 18? When I first tested Dorico’s slash notation functionality I didn’t get this but I don’t know that I had different sized bars in that test piece.

As an aside, the reason the B7/E symbol is touching the end of the staff is that I resized the chords symbol from default 11.0 to 13.0. I assume that at some point, the devs will want to look at making sure the chord symbol spacing adjusts itself in situations like this, but it’s easy enough to move manually for now.

You’ve probably just answered your own question. Give us a screenshot that includes the rest of the staves within that system, and we’ll likely be able to confirm.

As an aside, the reason the B7/E symbol is touching the end of the staff is that I resized the chords symbol from default 11.0 to 13.0. I assume that at some point, the devs will want to look at making sure the chord symbol spacing adjusts itself in situations like this, but it’s easy enough to move manually for now.

I’m not quite sure why you’ve resized the chord symbol, but (just in case you’re not already aware) you can drag chord symbols around in Engrave mode.

Hey Leo, thanks as always for the reply.

In reverse order, I increased the size of the chord symbols because I want them to appear larger in the printed score. I did figure out that in Engrave Mode, I can just grab them and drag them around to simply move position.

Here’s the screenshot of the slashes with the bars above. I’ll be mildly surprised if Dorico is doing this on purpose. Dragging things around manually to make sure they look right is something I associate with another program I used to use : )


Notes aren’t musically coherent, they’re just me experimenting.

If this is expected behaviour, I’ll go about figuring out how to move the individual slashes manually so they look symmetrical.

Dear mset,
What your screenshot shows is coherent. If you’re not happy with it, you should fiddle with the note spacing settings (if you really want your slashes on equivalent distances, no matter what the other staves have as music content).
You’ll probably notice that the parts do not exhibit that behavior, obviously.

You can move the slashes without moving the notes in the other staves using the circular handles when editing note spacing in Engrave mode, but if it’s important that the slashes represent the rhythm to be played, my recommendation would be to leave them in place.

Aha, I see. I figured there’s a logic to this and it wasn’t a random occurrence.

In the lead sheet work I do, there are situations in which the slash part doesn’t necessarily need to incorporate the rhythm of a notated part. The slashes just represent ‘comping’.

For these situations I will respace using the handles.

Thanks as always for the help.

Whoops

I can move notes around just fine by getting into Engrave Mode, enabling Note Spacing and using the Alt + left arrow/right arrow technique described on Anthony’s page here

But I can’t get the slashes to move independently by clicking the box above the slash then clicking the circular handle. Please see attached.


The correct handle is chosen but I can’t get that slash to move. A ‘graphical adjustment’ should be possible using the same command Alt + left arrow/right arrow?

I see that if you have multiple notes in a chord for example, you can use the Voice Column Index to separate out the control of those notes but it doesn’t seem like that would be necessary here…

Any ideas?

It may well be that slashes in a slash region cannot be adjusted in this way, because they are not in every sense “real” notes, but you should find that if you input actual notes using a slash voice in the affected bars instead of using slash regions, you can nudge them left and right using the circular handles.

Hi Daniel and thanks as always for the response.

Okay, I tried that technique and it works. So this means that for my workflow, I’ll have to leave slash notation until the very end of some projects, because I’ll need to see where bars with notation that Dorico sizes differently will need to have their slashes adjusted like this. Not too tough unless there are lots and lots of bars that need adjusting.

I was going to say something like ‘Hopefully my Dorico fanboy status makes it okay to suggest that it would be really really helpful to be able to tell Dorico to just space slashes evenly throughout the bar no matter what’s going on rhythmically in a vertically aligned bar with lots of notation’…

but I’m assuming that if this were easy it would have been done. Is this baked in or could it be a feature request? I’m guessing there are one or two lead sheet writers who would like it : )

It would be pretty awkward to achieve, I’m afraid, but I would never say never, of course.

Okay thanks again Daniel.