So I just recently received Dorico as a birthday present. I started it up and began fiddling around. I noticed that the program was grouping all my quarter notes in a measure together. For my purposes, I want to be able to group them differently (in pairs) and I gathered online that I could do this in “Notation Options”. I cannot, for the life of me, find the “Notation Options” dialogue box. According to the online documentation you can pull it up under Write > Notation Options, Setup > Notation Options, or Using the hotkeys (ctrl+shift+N). I simply cannot find “Notation Options” in any of the drop down menus and using the hotkeys does absolutely nothing. Could it be the version? I received Dorico Elements 3.5, are notation options only available in the the “pro” package (God, I hope not)? Or am I just missing something ridiculously obvious (pretty likely). Can someone maybe post a screenshot of where this dialogue box is hidden?
My apologies for the silly question. Other stuff seems pretty intuitive, I just can’t figure this one thing out
I see it now in here, “Custom note and rest groupings”. Fair enough.
I did mean 8th notes (or 16th, 32nd, etc.), sorry about that.
With a bit more exploring, I found that I can manually unbeam groups of 8th notes. That’ll work for my purposes, it’ll just be tedious to do it in every single measure. I’m intending to use this primarily for folk/old time string music. For an instrument like Banjo, for example, especially in clawhammer and tenor banjo, you use lots of paired 8th notes. It’s just harder to read when they’re all beamed together. I’m also seeing now that there’s no notation for hammer-on and pulloffs either, I’m assuming I can work around that with slurs and inserting text…
In the time signature popover, using the square brackets [ and ] you can write [1+1+1+1]/4, and Dorico will be display 4/4 and beam to each quarter note.
Give that a try. I haven’t ever used Elements, but I believe the time signature popover is identical.
Certainly, that works. The 8ths will beam in pairs. That’s the intention of the bracket format, which allows the user to specify beam groupings.
If the OP wants the 8ths individually beamed, they would need to do the first measure manually, then in the second measure enter [1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1]/8, and hide the time signature.
Can you give me a screen shot of the appropriate option(s) when you have time? I did check Notation Options, but did not see that option (or combination) to produce that, and I did try a few I thought would work. In the meanwhile I’ll take a second look to bring myself up to speed.
EDIT: Never mind: I found the option. Thanks for referring me back to it.
Of course Notation Options are not available in Elements, which is what the OP is using.
Ah yes, I forgot that. Thanks for referring me back to the limitations of Elements.
I especially liked the OP’s opting for a refund for something he/she received as a birthday present!
Certain Notation Options that apply to time signatures with a half-bar still apply to 4/4, even if it was input explicitly with 4 separate beat groups.
