subdivisions clearly beamed?

Is there a way to beam so 8th and 16th subdivisions are very clear?

Please see example – of what Dorico does – and my handwriting of what I want:


In examples #1 and #2, Dorico’s beaming is unclear (especially #2 – that’s complete gobbledygook to my eyes).

I thought maybe setting the meter to 8/8 or 16/16 might help, but 8/8 made it even more unreadable and 16/16 didn’t change anything.

Another related topic, less important but a personal preference, again for utmost clarity in rhythmic notation – in example #3, I want the 32nd beams to extend to the right to cover the 32nd rest. I found I can achieve that by turning on stemlets, but I don’t like the look of the stemlets themselves…

Many thanks for any ideas!

Update: I figured out a way to beam it correctly, but with a ludicrous time signature and a very laborious use of the Scissors tool and Edit>Beaming>Split beam (and >Split secondary beam). Is there a way to have everything beamed this way automatically, in common time? (Or any other meter.)

Why not like this?
cello rhythm.png

If you put your numerator between in your popover entrythe time sig will look way better!

Rob – Thanks for that idea. I agree using the tuplet is much more elegant on the page, but I don’t want a player to have to scratch their head over it! I prefer to have all beats and subdivisions clearly spelled out.

Marc – Thanks for the tip!

Surely there must be a way to tell Dorico how I want everything beamed? It would be so much easier to just enter a string of, say, dotted 16ths, and have it automatically beamed/tied out with all beats and subdivisions clearly visible. I mean, Dorico does that kind of rhythmic respelling in simpler contexts!

You can always enter the passage with force duration without ties and then tie afterwards. Sometimes, that’s the quickest way. Then you only have to beam the end bit together, and split a secondary beam in engrave mode.This took a couple of minutes.

What I don’t understand is that (from a new user perspective) it seems to me that Dorico is really smart about how to show subdivisions, but not always, and not always correctly. Please correct me if I’m wrong! For instance:


In Cello 3 I entered a bunch of dotted 32nds, hoping they would automatically be grouped/beamed to show 8th and 16th subdivisions clearly. Instead, I got this. The weird thing to me is that as you can see it does split up the sub-beaming, but not in any way that has anything to do with the meter. Where did that come from? Is this a bug? I couldn’t find anything in Notation Options that addresses this. Maybe I’m missing some underlying concept.

Another example:


I entered a note length of 5 32nds and pressed “R” to repeat it, again hoping it would be grouped sensibly. Dorico does adjust the groupings, but in a nonsensical way: there’s no easy way to read at a glance how each beat subdivides.

I know I can enter all this manually, but since Dorico does understand how to divide up rhythmic notation in other contexts, I feel like I must surely be missing something here.

I like to play with what you might call written-out concurrent tempos (à la Nancarrow or Adès), and it would be such a gift to be able to make adjustments in situ and not have to spend forever fixing all the notation. I would love to be able to tell Dorico how every subdivision should look [in a flow or region].

Hello,
I managed to make your 2nd staff very easily by activating the Lock the duration of the Write mode function. On the other hand, I did not manage to lengthen the ligatures of the 2nd measure.
cordially
jp29
Violoncello corrected.zip (826 KB)

While I understand the frustration inherent in entering more complicated rhythms into a computer program, in the case of Dorico, notation options will not always be a panacea, and forcing it to notate a passage with ties at a 32nd/64th level as a notation option is something that can bite back later in a flow. What may seem an obvious way to notate such a passage to you, because of the context, is not something everyone will require often, and notating it with dotted 32nd is perfectly “acceptable” in most cases, just not in this case. GIving Dorico the option to use ties at any level is likely to create a huge amount of sub-choices in Notation Options, perhaps too much to make it practical. In the end, that’s why there is a force duration tool. A passage such as the first example in your last post is easy to enter by forcing duration on just the first two notes, tying them and then pressing r. One can then use lock durations to enter the notes. Here is a gif to demonstrate this. You may want to fiddle with beaming afterwards.
Beams.gif

That is basically what I did in my first reply, but to have the requested beaming on the second bar there is now a notation option concerning secondary beams and rests that takes care of this. One then simply have to beam the group together afterwards

Thank you Claude for your advice.