I was quite surprised from the possibilities of the tuplet popover in the new TipsTuesday Tutorial.
Wouldn’t it be good, to add the tuplet popover to the “Popovers in Dorico” list?
The possible beat unit entries are already documented here, but yes I’ll make a note to add the tuplets popover to the PDF.
Seems that I’ve missed that bit, when it was added in Dorico 2. I never would have looked into the manual, because I thought I already know everything concerning tuplets …
Aha, well the manual is always on the move so I’d say it’s always worth a check-in every now and then (but then again I would say that, wouldn’t I…)
Dear Lillie,
We’re some early users who have been trained with Dorico without any manual, so it’s not our natural move to look into it. But we’re wrong, it’s clear since I learned that tuplet popover trick this afternoon!
That’s cool, will have to remember it!
Another example of something on my list of things to request that already exists.
Maybe it’s me, but for me it doesn’t work. I do exactly as the video says, but the tuplet entered will be in the value of the note previously selected in the left-hand window. When there’s a quarter note selected -which is selected by default by Dorico when you press Shift+N to enter notes- and then type ‘;’ followed by ‘6:4 x’ f.e., I get a very strange rhtythmic notation, but not a sixtuplet of 16th notes. Same when I type ‘6:4 4’ a wrong tuplet is entered into the score.
Am I missing something, or is it a bug? I’m on Dorico 3.1, so latest version.
The notes inside a tuplet can be a different length from how the tuplet is defined. For example it is quite common to have “triplets” with a quarter note and an eighth note.
When you type 6:4x in the popover you are defining the “size” of the tuplet bracket. If you then start entering quarter notes, the first note will take up four of the 16ths, and the second one will be split up and tied to a note in the next tuplet.
If you want to create a 6:4 tuplet containing 16th notes, there are two options:
- In input mode press 4 for 16th-notes, then type 6:4 in the tuplet popover, then enter the notes. Dorico uses the current note duration for the tuplet if you don’t specify something different (e.g. “x”)
- Type 6:4x in the popover, and then press 4 before you enter the notes.
Note: In fact the first quarter note is split up as well, because in a 6:4 tuplet Dorico thinks the “6” should be beamed as “3+3”. See attachment.
Thanks for your reply. I always used option 1, no problems there.
What you describe in option 2 is not what the video says. Or better: the video says to type in f.e. 5:4 x to write a 16th quintuplet, no matter what note value you have selected in the left window. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work, unless you indeed set the value in the left window to the value needed for the desired tuplet, like you say.
Is this a big problem? No, not really, but this way there’s not really a difference in the way you enter tuplets, despite the fact the method in the video is a nice one for faster workflow, at least in case out would work as out should.
Since it doesn’t in my case, I thought it might be a bug.
I think it depends how you interpret the words. I think a “16th quintuplet” means “a tuplet with a duration of 4 16th-notes that contains 5 16th-notes.” It doesn’t say anything about the notes it actually contains - that might be 5 16ths, or 2 8ths and a 16th, or part of a whole note tied to something else, or whatever.
The point of the “x” input is to specify the duration of the tuplet independent of the notes you are entering. If you are already entering 16th-notes and you want a 5:4 tuplet of 16th notes, you can just type 5:4 in the popover.
It does work absolutely fine: you have created your tuplet with the 16th note unit as you requested, but the actual note you then enter isn’t automatically switched to be the same unit as the tuplet’s own unit.