Well Temperment

Dorico
1

Is there a way to use Werckmeister 1/4 comma well-temperament tuning system (Werkmeister I/Werckmeister III; there are two numbering systems)?

The tonality system options don’t seem to allow the same type of accidentals to affect different notes differently. In this tuning system, the distance between, for example, C and C# is different from the distance between D and D#. I saw this brought up in an earlier post, and someone said that it was possible to set up Dorico’s playback to do this “using the tuning options in Dorico,” but the only tuning option that I can find outside of the tonality editor is setting the Hertz value for A4.

2

The easiest way to do this (if your sample library and player support it) is to change the playback temperament there, not to set up a non-standard tuning system in Dorico. Many sample players support the Scala format for defining temperaments, and Scala files for all the “well known” temperaments have already been created.

Attempting to do it in Dorico may lead to problems. For example you might not be able to transpose a passage, if the temperament doesn’t support “exact” transposition, and that applies to most well-temperaments, except for special cases of intervals and notes which happen to work out exactly.