I’m struggling to control/understand the duration of pauses/holds/fermatas.
I have a slow tempo (q=50) and want my final pause to be ‘a bit longer’. I notice that - no matter what I do - at the last bar, the tempo drops from 50 to at most 25, such as in the settings indicated in the screen dump (1% for both Gap and Hold duration, where I freely admit not quite knowing what the latter does, but I suspect that is irrelevant). If I untick both these options, the tempo drops from MM50 to MM17, and likewise if I explicitly ask for 50% for both, which is also my personal default for ‘normal holds’. For completion’s sake: if I remove the hold, the tempo stays at MM50.
Dorico slows the tempo in order to “create” the extra time for both the hold and the gap. I wouldn’t worry too much about what the specific values are; but what the result is.
50% hold means that the note is 1.5 times as long as a normal note. In your example, 50% would mean a 3 beat note becoming a 4.5 beat note.
To do this, Dorico reduces the played length of the note by half, drops the tempo sufficiently to allow that half to play for 3 times its ‘normal’ length; and then resets the tempo for the remaining ‘silent’ half of the note.
All in all: don’t worry about the tempi numbers: just experiment with values until you get what you want . if you just want to add “a bit” of time to the note, then just add something like 15%, and see what that’s like.
If you don’t want an additional gap after the note, set it to 0%.
But that’s not what I’m observing. I’m seeing that with a 1% hold, the note becomes twice as long (as the tempo drops by 50%). And I don’t see a way to get “only a bit longer”.
Correct, in this version it was switched off, apologies for the confusion. But more importantly, when you play it, does the MM drop from 50 to 17 and produce a ridiculously long pause?
I think, maybe, you have stumbled upon a bug, because it would appear you can’t set the Hold tempo higher than half the preceding tempo, even when dragging the handle in the Tempo editor. And I don’t remember it being like this earlier.
You can cheat it, though,
if you add a tempo handle (the orange handle) and drag it upwards. After doing this you can raise the Hold handle (but still no higher than half the value of the added handle). The Gap handle, on the other hand, is freely adjustable.
Hmm. Maybe you’re right, and the length is right, even though the tempo indication is erroneous. In my original I had a rit in the penultimate bar, making the length very long indeed, but possibly still correct. Since then, I’ve been too focussed on that tempo marking.
