Staccato in wrong location

I’m thinking this is related to how Dorico deals with tied notes. I need the staccato over the eighth note, not the half note.

Screen Shot 2021-03-05 at 3.26.22 PM

See Changing the positions of articulations on tie chains for how to handle this locally. Read the tip towards the bottom for how to handle this globally.

The reason for its default placement (on the last note in the tie chain) is because staccatos affect a note’s duration - that is, they indicate notes should be played shorter. Therefore, Dorico shows this at the end of the note, as that’s where the shortening takes place.

In your example, how do you want the player to interpret an eighth note with a staccato, tied to a half note? If you want them to play it short, like the previous 3 eighth notes with staccatos, does it need to be tied?

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Hi there

It looks as if this is a specifically piano usage of a staccato dot to mean a type of key-strike, which therefore does affect the attack of a note.

I strongly dislike this, as it’s ambiguous on longer note values (tied or not) and would prefer some other way of notating it, but I’m not aware of another articulation sign that would serve.

I did have success with one composer in substituting a textual indication: he eventually settled on ‘brittle’ placed after the dynamic.

Just some related thoughts. Ignore at will.
Jeremy

I agree with Jeremy. I really don’t like this notation, as it’s ambiguous, which is not the point of a medium like music notation which is supposed to communicate an intention as clearly as possible. And even the classical period use of the staccato to mean a light accent was generally only used on shorter notes, certainly not on tied ones. I seem to remember Schumann, Brahms and Poulenc, among others, writing short chords (sometimes with staccatos) with pedal, indicating an indication for a different kind of attack. I’d be curious to see the context of SleepyinSeattle2’s example, just to check whether I could get an idea of what might be intended.

just to come back to this for a moment – the notation is not really the issue as this can be easily be corrected, as @pianoleo has said. However, the playback remains incorrect – a tied staccato note, even with “maximum duration for staccato playback technique” switched off, reverts to the technique which would apply without the staccato marking. Whether this is new to 4.3, I cannot unfortunately say.

I believe the way this works is as follows. With “Maximum duration for staccato playback technique” turned off (the old behaviour, as of v3.5) any tied notes will play back without triggering the “staccato” playback technique, though they will still be shortened as per the note length rules. With “Maximum duration for staccato playback technique” turned on (the new behaviour, as of v4.3) then it will depend on the note’s overall duration, rather than whether or not it is tied. (Our refs.: STEAM-10717, STEAM-12300.)

the trouble is that enabling the max duration to crochet has disabled the staccato altogether as can be seen in the screenshot. This should work as all the notes are crochets (increasing it to minim makes no difference). If max duration is disabled, it works for the non-tied notes.

I don’t find that to be the case. Can you please share a minimal project that reproduces the problem? Just a single bar with a couple of staccato crotchets should be sufficient.

Bear in mind it will depend on the speed of the music - you have defined the note length threshold as being equivalent to a crotchet at 120 bpm, so if your piece is slower then crotchets in your piece will be over the threshold.

Will it not also depend on the sound set and its articulations and keycodes?

Can someone (@JHughes?) explain to me how the last dyad in the OP can be played any differently (by a human pianist), with or without a staccato dot?

Richard has got the right answer here – the tempo at this point in the project is crochet =44, therefore only if you set the maximum duration to a whole note (semibreve) or longer is it going to work in this context. I must say I do find this confusing though as the dialogue only specifies the written note and not the played duration. I’d completely forgotten that this feature is dependent on the timing and I think it should be made clear in the dialog that you will need to do some mental arithmetic – or more simply just choose the highest offered note value.

The strategy of disabling maximum duration fails as it then seems to revert to the previous behaviour, as Richard has pointed out.

For what it’s worth, the reason we use played duration here is because of the link to playback. Any sort of staccato sample/synthesis is likely to be dominated by the sound’s attack rather than any sort of looped sustain, so the point at which you want to stop using a staccato technique for playback is quite likely going to be influenced by the length of this attack.

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no, that’s fair enough --was thinking about this a bit and what you say makes sense.