Sorry, folks, but I’ve been trying to get my head around ties in Dorico for weeks, and I still haven’t got the hang of it. According to the help pages, all I have to do to tie a note to another one of the same pitch is to press T, but nothing happens when I try, at least in this example. In this bar of 5/4 (attached), after several attempts, I even tried to input the F# as a crotchet, hoping Dorico might ‘split’ it into the expected notation, but it just left it as a crotchet, which looks all wrong. What am I missing? I promise, I am doing my best to learn, but 20 years (or something) of Sibelius has evidently closed my mind to new ways of working…
Can you turn on voice colors to confirm that all the notes are in the same voice? I think that must surely be the problem, as the behavior of ties is pretty predictable otherwise.
If they aren’t, you can still tie them together. Click the first, then Ctrl-click the second note. Then T.
Does it help if you enter the time signature in the popover as [1+1+1+1+1]/4?
I don’t think that’s related to the behavior of ties here, or the ability to tie selected notes together.
Thanks for the quick responses, both. I tried your suggestions, but to no avail. However, I discovered that the T command didn’t work under any circumstances, so I checked the note input preferences, and it was then I remembered… I’d changed it to the Sibelius key (Enter on the numpad) when I’d started with Dorico. So it was all my doing, and I’m so sorry for being such a chump and taking up people’s time.
I do. Take a look.
The OP (Original Problem) was that T wasn’t working at all, not that it affected note groupings in an undesirable way.
The OP’s problem was “nothing happens,” not “the wrong thing happens”.
Remember that internally Dorico handles “tied notes” as one long note. The ties you see are just part of the notation, and are affected by beat grouping, notes crossing bar lines, etc. (I’m ignoring “force duration” and ties between notes in different voices here, for simplicity).
Maybe is just that my comprehension of English is not good enough, but Gareth also wrote “I even tried to input the F# as a crotchet, hoping Dorico might ‘split’ it into the expected notation, but it just left it as a crotchet, which looks all wrong”. I know now that the problem was relatede to the key shortcuts but i wonder if he got what he expected (the dotted 8th tie to the 16th if i understood that correctly) just with the defaults.
Gareth said “all I have to do to tie a note … is to press T, but nothing happens when I try”. That is what Dan and I were referring to.
Thanks for pursuing this aspect of the matter. I did find it odd that - when I experimentally inputted the crotchet in the expectation that Dorico would distribute its value between the dotted quaver of beat 4 and the semiquaver in beat 5 - it chose instead to keep the crotchet and also beam the two beats together. As part of my efforts to understand what was happening, I checked that my beaming preferences were indeed ‘Break beams at beat boundaries’, and I couldn’t square that with how my 5/4 bar was being treated. From now on I shall remember the [1+1+1+1+1]/4 system and its variants.