Tremolo Collision with ties

Is there some setting to resolve this? In Engraving Options, I found many settings for placing the slashes relative to the stems, flags, beams, etc - and I find my slashes look good in pretty much all of those situations. But with these notes, which have plenty of space both vertically and horizontally, the slashes do not adjust to avoid the ties between notes. This seems like something that could/should be automatic along with the many other Engraving Options regarding tremolos?

Perhaps change the Engraving options>ties>advanced options to increase the spacing?

While I agree that Dorico should handle this situation more gracefully, perhaps it’s also worth considering whether the ties are actually necessary, since these notes aren’t actually tied, of course: they’re in fact being repeatedly replayed, rather than held.

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Hi Janus,

While I think the current setting should be accommodated for, I hadn’t considered altering the setting for ties as opposed to the tremolos!

Changing the choice of ā€œtie endpoints to center of noteheadsā€ to ā€œtie endpoints at edges of noteheadsā€ results in no collision. In the abstract, I would prefer the ties being centered, but attaching to the edge of noteheads looks fine and is a perfectly reasonable compromise to avoid collision. Thank you!

On reflection, I think Daniel’s observation that ties are probably redundant in this context is correct. You could save yourself time/effort by simply removing them.

True. I’ve seen it done with and without ties before, and without ties comes with the added benefit of less ink/less clutter.

While I did manage to prevent collisions by altering where ties attach to, I’ll proceed with just removing the ties altogether. Thank you!

If the case of a situation where the ties were required to be retained (a request by a client, for example), it is possible to move the tremolo markings up or down in Engrave mode. Multiple markings can be selected and moved together using alt/opt + up/down arrow, and shift + alt/opt + up/down arrow for greater movement.

Yes, I’m aware of the manual capability. However, it seems to me that the default behavior of Dorico should not result in collisions. And with all of the capabilities Dorico has for defining your own, individual defaults (settings), it seemed to me that there might be an option that didn’t require manually fixing something that shouldn’t happen in the first place.

That’s true of course, but there’s a philosophical difference (between different composers/editors/publishers) on this point. Some would agree with you, while others find the ties useful for clarifying that no perception of re-attack is wanted in each bar. This can come up in older scores, especially but not solely with long timpani rolls. Performers and conductors can decide according to the context, of course, but some feel that they shouldn’t have to solve ambiguous situations.

This was my initial thought too, actually. But I’ve worked with orchestras multiple times, and honestly, they haven’t generally ā€œarticulatedā€ untied tremolos. So, from a performance stand point, trying to maintain the ties just wasn’t that important for me.

But if you’re trying to accurately engrave an existing work which used that notation style, then this is certainly still an issue.

I’ve seen Bartók use dashed ties to indicate a conceptually ā€˜held’ tremolo. I found it very clear.

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