Hello. I’m having a lovely time during my Dorico Trial. I plan to buy when chord symbols are added! I’m having a bit of trouble accomplishing something rather simple, though and I think I’m missing something.
I am creating lead sheets meant for sight reading on the gig. Because of this, I like to show down beats when possible in my note groupings.
For instance, I am trying to show the fourth sixteenth note of a beat, tied to a dotted eighth note on the next down beat. Dorico seems to want to combine these automatically into a quarter note. It makes sense, but obscures the downbeat more than I would like for this purpose. Am I missing something simple?
Normally, notation options has a “syncopation” section to deal with this. But this seems odd to me because of the small values. Could you give a screenshot so we can see the meter involved and the context … Otherwise, the clamp tool (“o”) works well
First image here is what Dorico is giving me.
Second image is what I want.
I want the beams to reflect the beats and the ties when a duration crosses a beat. I think I set the flow preferences correctly, but I could be wrong. Thanks for your help!
I see a bit more clearly. First, I agree that it should be done more automatically in this case (I’ll let someone from Steinberg answer that part). However, it looks very much like your 7/4 is a group of seven independent quarter notes and that there is very little traditional grouping. If you select the first note, type shift+m and then type “[3+4]/4,0.5”, it will already be better. But typing the 7/4 as a group of seven independent beats “[1+1+1+1+1+1+1]/4,0.5”, which seems to fit that excerpt, will give you the full results automatically.
This does work (thank you!) but it’s a little ridiculous. The time signature is most certainly 7/4 and should display that way. It seems like much better form to me to have the notes group like the second image I posted. The first way obscures too much. I’m certain there’s something I’ve missed.
At the bottom of this thread is a link to all the popovers available to Dorico. Under time signatures, you can see all the wonderful ways in which you can manipulate the notation to various ends.
The default 7/4 grouping, probably [4+3]/4, makes sense if you’re using a combination of quarter notes and eighth notes. With lots of 16ths, as in your example, it is best to force each beat to beam separately. Sibelius works this way as well, with an option to change the default beaming of a time signature. Dorico implements this feature via popover, which for me is turning out to be more efficient than the dialog box in Sibelius.
As Claude says, you need to type the brackets for the popover to work correctly.
Brilliant! Yes, I agree on the popovers. I think it’s a great feature. I totally missed the brackets! Thanks very much, both of you. Dorico is very attractive. I like that you can get to most things (in my limited experience) from the keyboard and without digging through menus and dialogs.
