Tuple polyrhythm alignment

It’d be nice if Dorico did a better job of default placement of tuples in a polyrhythm to make sure that relative timing placement is correct. I assume in engrave mode I could force these into position, but why should I have too?



If you have two voices with the same stem direction, Dorico won’t put one voice’s noteheads directly above the other voice’s noteheads, or it could be ambiguous as to which voice the notes belonged to.

In your scenario, where decay isn’t an issue, it doesn’t matter if the first crotchet/quarter is misinterpreted as part of a tuplet (quintuplet quaver/eighth rather than a regular crotchet/quarter) , but in much music the decay matters just as much as the attack.

And yes, you can switch to Engrave mode and set all of the notes’ Voice Column Indexes to 0.

These are percussion/drumset examples… as they’re written, it looks like the first note in particular would be horribly misinterpreted… and further, I’ve no confidence that reader would properly work out the relationship/spacing of other notes.

“If you have two voices with the same stem direction, Dorico won’t put one voice’s noteheads directly above the other voice’s noteheads, or it could be ambiguous as to which voice the notes belonged to.”

I beg to differ:

Clear as day as to what voice each note belongs to… and note-heads align perfectly.

That’s a single voice with multiple notes (chords, if you will), which is a different thing altogether.

My kick drum, snare, high hat (foot and hand) have very different voices (in fact, even in Dorico, they’re setup as different instruments), and I never think of them as ‘chords’, like one does w/ such unisons on a piano.

I see no reason that a unison between different instruments on a kit would be misaligned if one happens to be in a tuple.

You asked “why should I have to do this”. The answer is “because in most music this stuff matters”. There is nothing percussion specific in the options for how voices are spaced. Maybe you’d like to request such a feature. Maybe it’s already on the todo list - I have no idea.

Let me illustrate:

How long are the low Fs?

Exactly the same image with voice colors turned on:

The same music in Play mode:

Dorico doesn’t put one upstem voice on top of another upstem voice, because in music that isn’t on percussion, it’s misleading. It matters whether something is actually a quarter/crotchet or a quintuplet eighth/quaver.

It’s not my place to tell you what to do, but I think if I were notating this I’d have feet down, which would entirely solve the problem…

3 Likes

if I were notating this I’d have feet down, which would entirely solve the problem…

Brilliant! Thank you!

Also a bit hard to read when 12 16-notes are beamed together.

Jesper

hmm… maybe… I guess it depends on what you’re used to… I’ve seen plenty of transcriptions in magazines and books that are done this way… using that ‘other’ software. Below, I find the former harder to read than the later


Yes, but the latter is beamed in groups of 4, not 12, it’s hard to see the beat otherwise.
I’m not talking about voices.
Jesper

oh, you’re referring to that 5/4 measure I posted… yes, I agree, my preference would also be to beam each ‘beat’. My point of that was showing that unisons across different instruments can, in fact, align.