I am having trouble with accelerandos. It seems to pop up whenever I work with them. I enter a start tempo and an end tempo. I enter an accelerando and adjust the beginning and ending referents to match those tempos. It works fine…until I start adjusting the start and end tempos. Then accelerandos seem to take on a life of their own that can’t be tamed.
Start Tempo, q = 170
End Tempo, q = 190
Enter Accelerando and link to those two tempos
Edit Start Tempo to 175
Edit End Tempo to 190
During playback tempo accelerates to about 225 before coming back down right before the end tempo.
I delete the tempos and the accelerando and start over, figuring this will reset everything. No such luck. The same tempo artifact occurs.
I try to mess with the Time track nodes, but no matter what I do it’s as if this wild card tempo over 200 is a cat with well over nine lives.
This is a recurring problem in different projects when I try to edit accelerandos. Is this unique to me? Any suggestions for how to overcome it?
Yes, Doico doesn’t currently take an absolute tempo at the end of the gradual tempo into account when determining the final tempo (though I agree it should), so as ChuckDimeCliff suggests you need to adjust the final tempo via Properties for now.
Updated to 3.1, did as suggested, still not working. If anything the problem has become worse, the tempo rapidly accelerating to more than 300. The Time Track in Play Mode shows a tempo line that reflects this too-fast playback, going literally off the charts.
Attached are:
Write Mode with accelerando selected and lower panel detail
The final tempo % is set to 195. This is not 195 BPM, but instead 195 percent of the original tempo. The way you have it set, you’re starting at 180 and accel. to 180 BPM × 195% = 351 BPM. You need to set it to 195 ÷ 180 = 108.3%. You have to use percentages, not the desired BPM.
Ah, thanks, that makes all the difference. I didn’t understand that it was a percentage rather than an absolute tempo. Looking more carefully I can see the percent sign in the field text.
What would be helpful is the ability to select the first tempo in the score that will set the initial tempo, then ALT-select the second tempo in the score to set the final tempo, with Dorico inserting the accelerando between them and using the absolute tempos to calculate whatever curve is appropriate.
I imagine that’s the end state the team envisions.
