I really am trying to use Dorico for my new large theater project, but I just can’t get into the composing flow because of little issues. For example, the dynamics acting weird. Suddenly there are double dynamics attached to a single staff. I delete one of them and all of the other staves get delete as well. I now this is because of grouping and Linking, but is there please a way to turn these options off by default? I never found this option helpful and I cannot count the amount of time I spent to correct their behaviour.
Plus notes that I paste on another staff are being notated with the stems into the wrong direction and there seems to be no other way to correct this than by re-entering them again, what is the point of copy/paste in that case?
Slurs jump all the way to many bars further and it seems this is because somehow there were different voices used within a single staff, no idea why, because I know how to work with voices. Selecting those bars and assigning them to a single voice makes the whole phrase jump 20 bars further…
I know i am ranting here, but it’s very frustrating because I really want to compose my new work in Dorico, but I can’t not get into that composing flow because of these things. Plus just now, Dorico crashed again. Maybe it’s not the right time for me to start a large work that I have pretty much finished in my head into Dorico. Plus a theatre company is already interested in performing this work which makes me want to work as fast as possible.
Not sure to be honest what I want to achieve with this post, i know there are probably solutions for everything, but maybe I am not the only one having the feeling it’s better to wait to the next version before trying to write a large work?
I can only give you a general reply. You are not the only one who feels that Dorico’s feature set to support a composing environment is not yet ready to support their work.
Of course, others disagree because for the way they work it does support it, or whatever workarounds have been designed do not interrupt their focus on composing too badly.
I imagine it’s pretty individual, but I for one continue to have Dorico “on the shelf” waiting for the day it becomes a suitable tool for my efforts to compose and arrange. Previous discussion threads have made it clear that some features desired by some who want to use Dorico for composition are yet a ways away.
Dear Andre, I understand your frustration, but you seem to consistently come up with glitches that few or none are able to reproduce. Are you sure it’s not a bad interaction with High Sierra?
The only behavior I’ve sort of encountered was regarding dynamics. I think we’ve discussed it briefly over facebook some time ago. If I unlink dynamics, they stay unlinked. If they don’t, I can usually trace it back to a fault of mine, and nothing gets in the way because the color code alerts me when something is wrong. All the rest is quite foreign to me. I’ve never seen it in person, nor have I read someone here describing those issues. And it’s all very bizarre, I understand, but all the more noticeable it would be to the rest of the users.
I’m afraid I’m with LSalgueiro here, and as such it’s not about waiting for the next version, it’s about learning best practice for using the software. The next version isn’t going to be any better for you if you go on making the same mistakes.
I implore you to:
a) go through all the instructional videos
b) keep the PDF manual to hand
c) keep reading this forum.
Re: dynamics, be very careful about where you have “alt” pressed - if you’re finishing the popover with alt-enter you’re entering a voice-specific dynamic, rather than a staff-specific dynamic. No, there’s no way of globally turning off linked and grouped dynamics, but I promise that in my experience they’re much more often useful than unhelpful, and you can assign shortcuts to unlink and ungroup.
Re: slurs, work with Voice Colors turned on, and if something goes wrong, go backwards rather than trying to continue forwards - hit Cmd/Ctrl-Z to undo the slur, THEN fix the voices, then redo the slur. Slurring from one voice to another voice should be as simple as selecting the first note, Cmd/Ctrl (not shift) selecting the last note and hitting S.
Re: pasting into other Staves, are you pasting into the correct voice?
I am curious, Andre, have you run a disk diagnostic? Or maybe tried a complete full reinstall of the software? I am running on MacOS High Sierra and am not having any real problems. Maybe once in a few months something crashes, but it is very, very rare.
The dynamic issue of linking and unlinking is inherent in the software, but the other issues you mention doesn’t seem like anything I have run across. I am wondering if there is an issue with your copy of Dorico and how it is interacting with your machine.
Dear Andre,
I’m impressed with the high quality of Pianoleo’s answer. Those steps (that I know, for sure, but had not read in such a clear and concise way) could be part of a document that would be very useful for EVERY Dorician
Good luck with your work, I’m quite confident you can make it !
The glitch appears when you copy a part that has dynamics and paste it over a part (eg in another instrument) that already has dynamics. The notes get replaced, the dynamics are added. You end up with 2 “f” above each other, and if one of them is already part of a group, and you delete the wrong of the 2, you end up with the whole group of fortes disappearing.
This very thing happened to me time and again, and it’s really frustrating.
Re Stems: after pasting, if they’re wrong, choose Edit>Stem>Remove Forced Stem. You may have, at some stage, forced the direction of a stem in the source passage and Dorico is just copying its attributes. This happens a lot with me with files that were XML imports into Dorico in earlier versions of Dorico.
Agree about linking dynamics - it would be good to turn this off by default - at least temporarily when the editing gets fiddly.
Me agin: there were a few problems with dynamics and slurs getting pasted in wrong places with earlier version of Dorico, many of which were subsequently resolved; maybe double-check you have the latest version. All the best.
Thanks for all the suggestions, but for now I will write the score in Sibelius, its really less frustrating. I re-engraved all my piano pieces, choir pieces and solo piano/vocal piecesin Dorico, so I know Dorico pretty well I believe. Still, composing in it should go fast and not be interrupted by technical problems. I will do the parts in Dorico though, as I did with my previous opera, that goes very fast using a Sibelius XML import.
OK, I saw the new features in Dorico 2.0 just now and that NotePerformer is now working in Dorico. I don’t care anymore how frustrated I become sometimes; Dorico is my notation program from now on! I work a lot with theatre and video and this seems to be handled wonderful in Dorico 2.0
