Ties on Partial Chords

Dorico
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I’ve finally got the chance to play with Dorico after reading Daniel’s blog and this forum for months. Inspired by the Goldberg Variation folk, I started inputting some 19th c scores. For the most part I find the program easy to learn, and I’ve managed to solve most problems. I’ve come across two issues in this Rachmaninov cello sonata that have to do with piano chords being partially tied, or tied to different durations:

  1. In m13 the chord on beat three is tied over to 14, but the low G in the right hand is tied over to a quarter note, while the rest are tied to a half note. It seems Dorico won’t let me tie notes in different voices. I managed to reproduce the notation by creating the G in a different voice, forcing the stem up and using the ‘voice column index’ property to align it with the rest of the chord. Is this the best way to do that?

  2. In m5 the D in the left hand is tied to a quarter note chord on beat 3, which is then tied to a dotted quarter. The edition I’m using prefers quarter-tied-to-eighth rather than dotted quarter, which I find silly, but I want o reproduce for the Dorico learning experience. I used ‘force durations’ to get it all working, but when I tie the D from and-of-2, the chord on the downbeat of m6 reverts back to dotted quarter. Break the tie, and I get the original notation. It seems like some interaction between Dorico’s understanding of chords as singular events and of tied notes as singular events, and I can’t seem to break it. Is there a way to handle this?

Jay Vilnai
rachmaninov.dorico.zip (252 KB)

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You should certainly be able to tie notes in different voices, though you have to input them both first, then select them with click/Ctrl+click, and then hit T.

As for bar 5, left-hand, it’s a bit awkward, but if you reinput the chord at the start of bar 6 using a note duration of a quarter, overwriting the one that’s there, with Force Durations switched on, you should find that the remaining eight of the overwritten chord stays there, and all you then have to do is manually tie the quarter at the end of bar 5 to the quarter at the start of bar 6, and then manually tie that quarter to the remaining eighth, and all of the rhythms should stay put as they are intended.
rach.png

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Cool. I didn’t realize manual tying through ctrl+click was an option. That worked like a charm.

I got m5 working finally, but it took some tries, and had some unexpected results as I was doing it. It seemed Dorico really cared about the order in which I introduced the ties… I can’t say that I followed the process. I’m sure similar instances will come up, and I’ll see if I have a better idea how to handle those.

Thanks, Daniel!