When I place an 8va basso line below the notes, those notes are being transposed up one octave, which is of course not what I want. See screenshot. Any suggestions how I can avoid this from happening?
That’s the way D. works… you have to transpose them back. I don’t like this behaviour either …
Thanks, it’s a little strange behavior, I wonder why this has been programmed like this.
When you add an octave line like this, you don’t change the music, you change the appearance of the music. If you have a sounding C4, it will remain a sounding C4 after you add the line, though it’s notated differently. Think of it as changing a clef.
This behavior takes some getting used to if you come from Sibelius, but I think it makes perfect sense.
But the player will play the music one octave too high when playing it the way Dorico changes it.
It may make sense to some, but not to me. I can get used to it, by all means, but I don’t like it. When writing for the top octaves of the piano, I write the music where it’s easiest to read for the player (and easiest to enter for me), then add an octave line …
I totally get what you mean, and I sometimes feel the same. But sometimes I enter the music where it sounds, and then it’s nice to be able to add an octave line if it’s too hard to read, without shifting the notes manually. I think it depends more of different situations and workflows than taste.
Maybe insert mode could affect wether we ‘insert’ an octave line (transposing the music to sound and octave above or below), or just changing the appearance of the music as it does today. I think this could relate to the nice addition of insert mode for time signatures in 1.1
We have no plans to change this behaviour, any more than we would plan to make it possible to insert a clef change and not have the notes change position on the staff.
For the record, Finale behaves exactly as Andre, fratveno, and I prefer. One enters the notes where they are convenient, as in writing music by hand; then adds the octave sign with no resulting change of position of the notes.
Of course, in a minority of cases, one might change one’s mind about using an octave sign, and then the Dorico behavior would be preferable. But this occurs so much less often that it should just be an option, not the default.
This is an excellent example of when “logical” is not practical, since the apparent analogy with clefs is not exact: i.e. the great number of ledger lines required in notating very high or low notes at pitch in piano music, where octave signs are most prevalent, makes it inconvenient to notate them that way at first.
Well, I like the logical handling of that problem in Dorico. I do not find it that inconvenient to write down the music you want exactly where you want, and then apply an octave up or down to those notes before applying the new “key” octava… Of course I understand it involves adding some clicks and keystrokes, but for the sake of logic, I can live with it.
I think it’s more a matter of getting used to it when coming from another notation program that does it differently. Now I know it behaves this way I adapt to it.
The Dorico method has one big advantage: it gives you feedback of exactly which notes the octave line applies to. Other programs can leave you guessing, unless you play the score to check - especially if there are grace notes immediately before or after the line.
And shifting notes by an octave has a nice keyboard shortcut in Dorico.
For the record, despite being a long-time Finale user, I’m also a proponent of Dorico’s behavior in this case. It’s not necessarily that practical if you’re engraving from a manuscript where the octave lines are already set, but from a composing perspective, this seems far superior to me.
Dorico’s logical approach makes copying lines across instruments much more intuitive than the more basic, playback-centric approach taken by other scoring software. After all, octave lines aren’t ‘comme il faut’ for all instruments, and it’s helpful to always clearly see the sounding register of the music when copying across differently transposing instruments.
The impracticality of reading and entering is easily avoided by transposing the notes after the fact, as Rob points out.
In many scenarios it is practical to use an octave line in the score, but not in the part. Has this been considered?
No, at the moment it is not possible for an octave line to be shown in only one layout.