In argentine tango music, a staccato articulation means to play the note as short as possible, regardless of the note duration. How does one achieve this in playback in dorico? I can see that it is true for, for example, pizzicato strings, but I cannot find a way to make it true for piano and bandoneon, for example.
There are a number of things like this that I would like to achieve (arrastres, ligadura de dos, etc.) but this one seems like a good starting point.
Thanks in advance for any help.
well, I’d start with Dorico’s staccatissimo marking which reduces the length to 25% of the standard duration. If even that is too long you can edit that value in the (Library menu) Playback options → Timing to whatever you want. Or you can use the pianoroll Key Editor to resize individual notes as you please to the desired length.
Thanks, but that still leaves a quarter note staccato longer than an eighth note staccato, which is not idiomatic. If I reduce, for example, the quarter note to a percentage where it sounds “right”, then an eighth is too short. And I can’t edit each note by hand in an entire piece.
Is there a way to create a playback technique which would cause the instruments to do what the violin does in response to pizz, i.e. to always have the duration played be the same length regardless of note duration?
You could try creating a custom playing technique with a unique popover text and use the same glyph as the built-in staccato. This way, an internal staccato technique is preserved and your own custom technique exists alongside it. You might have to check mutual exclusion groups for this later. Perhaps this thread might help:
It would be a bit of work to set up, but you could create Expression Maps with differing duration settings dependent on note lengths:
well for most types of music, you would expect indeed a quarter note staccato to be longer than an eight note staccato, otherwise what’s the point in changing the notation. Of course there may be specific instances where the convention is to play as short as possible irrespective of notation such as perhaps your tango music. But as you seem to be referring to playback, then what you want to do is to choose the appropriate very short articulation for the instrument you’re using through mapping that to staccato in the Expression Map. With many virtual instruments, the timing is fixed according to the sample.
If your instrument has no articulations, as is usually the case with piano, I’d try experimenting with different staccato entries according to note lengths as @FredGUnn suggests. The problem here is that the note length boundaries are not yet user-editable and it may be there is no way of reliably distinguishing between a short staccato and an even shorter one. If you could give a very specific example of the sort of instrument and library you’re planning to use, it might be possible to be more detailed.
