Hello everyone, I exported a newly begun project from Finale and imported it into Dorico to continue working on it. I have had a number of odd problems with the notation, as I explain below. Has anyone else seen any of these issues and have an idea how they can be avoided? Is there some way to “clean up” Finale exports to ease the import into Dorico?
-) After the import certain noteheads were displayed in different colors. I could with some effort force them to be black (properties panel) but why they were red is a mystery. As I work on different sections sometimes some noteheads that I have forced to be black appear in colors again. I have not assigned different colors to the voices so I don’t see how that could be the reason for the different colors.
-) I also found that the voice assignments in Finale were lost in the import.
-) Much more troublesome is that many of the notes I have tied together do not play back as tied notes and I can’t seem to correct this. Whether I enter new notes or transpose imported ones doesn’t seem to matter. Whether they play back properly or not is unpredictable. I can’t always select the tied notes as a unit instead of the individual notes. I understand this could result from forcing the rhythmic duration of notes; but none of these notes has a forced duration, as far as I can see.
-) I also couldn’t notate slurs properly in a two-voice guitar part. The slur appeared over another voice instead of directly over the notes that I had selected.
-) I have already imported a number of small projects in into Dorico and generally I have to re-assign all the instruments after an import. The information Finale delivers is apparently not compatible with Dorico but that is not a big problem, it’s quick to fix .
Red notes (2 different shades) are warning about the range of an instrument. If you know what you’re doing, you can safely turn this display off in View > Note Colors. You might want to remove any manual coloring you did.
Voices in Finale can mean (a) layers, which should translate to Dorico “voices” pretty well, or (b) the older “voice 2” mechanism, which might not translate well. We’d have to see the source and the XML to be sure what’s happening.
If you use a slur, that is completely different from an actual tie. Are you talking about tieing in Finale or Dorico? It is essential to learn how Dorico treats tied notes as a single object. (We’ll get to that later.)
For specific cases of slurring, we’ll need to see a project. You can attach files once you’ve read enough on the forum and earned a “trust level”.
Yes, often instrument names can cause the wrong instruments to be created in Dorico. I’m glad you see how to remedy that.
Thank you, Mark, and thank you for your quick answer. 1) I thought about the instrument range warning but don’t see how that could apply here given the range I’ve notated. -) I mean the layers in Finale, “voice 2” I don’t know. -) I’ve seen that Dorico and Finale treat slurs and ties differently but possibly have not understood all the implications. I will get back to again you later. First (among other things) I have to figure out how to stop the forum from sending me so many emails. (I think if you can learn how to use the forum then learning Dorico is a piece of cake.)
Eric, we are creating answers, so you can post pictures and .dorico files sooner…
if your instrument has not been recognised in the process of xml transfer, you might have ended up with an instrument of a different range (which then show red note-heads for notes out of range). Are they still red, once you have pasted them to the correct instrument?
Thank you kb. I hadn’t thought of that but I had changed the instrument to the correct one right at the beginning. There are sections where the same interval is repeated and one of the intervals has red noteheads and the others don’t. It looks like I can upload stuff (yippee!) so I have uploaded the file I am describing here.
-I am unable to add a slur from the last eighth-note in the lower voice in measure 13 to the first half-note in that voice in measure 14. The slur connects the note in measure 13 to the upper voice in measure 14 (the uploaded file doesn’t have the slur in it).
-) In the saxophone voice after measure 99 there are ties that are not played back as ties.
-) In measure 113 there are red noteheads on one of several repeated intervals.
It looks like the lowest note available on your gitarre is D4 (according to the tuning set up in Setup), the red notes are below that, hence out of range (note: you are using an 8ve down treble clef).
The last eighth-note is in the upper voice. The half-note is in the lower voice. To connect slurs between voices select the first note and ctrl-click the end note, then hit S.
Those are not ties - they are slurs. Remove the slurs and hit T to create the tie.
It looks like you have manually set the colour of the out of range notes to black. To remove these, select all the Gitarre notes and switch off the color property.
If you don’t want to see out of range notes in red uncheck View>Notes and Rest Colors> Notes out of range.
When I select the last eighth-note in measure 13 I see in the status line at the bottom that it is voice 2; same with the half-note. I’m missing something here and will look in the manual.
You are right, I used a slur instead of a tie in the saxophone voice.
Why the lowest note on a guitar is not by default an E, as in standard tuning, I don’t know but I didn’t think to look at that, which I will do forthwith. I’ll also have to look into the 8ve down clef issue in more detail. Most modern guitar notation I have seen doesn’t use this clef although I understand it is formally the correct one to use. It seems to play back in the correct octave–are my ears fooling me?
In any event you’ve helped me a great deal, thanks again!
For the sake of completeness I have marked Janus’s entry above as the solution, as it points to solutions to a number of the problems I have listed. The problem with the slurs seems to have to do with a sub-optimal automatic assignment of notes to voices through the import. There might be a more elegant way to deal with this but rewriting the affected sections is, I think, the quickest way in this case. Thanks again to everyone who helped.