Whole note diamond notehead?

[claude_g_lapalme]

I did stumble upon a workaround. In the Notehead Set Editor. I replace the notehead with the diamond found in the Medieval Notehead section of Smufl, but first I delete the old one, add a space, scale the space down to 50%, add the diamond notehead and save. Now, I have a downstem whole note harmonic that is well position, but not an upstem one. The solution, flip the stem on the “upstem” whole note by typing F.

[klafkid]

IIRC you could also create a second notehead and apply each of your medieval noteheads to different stem directions.

[JesterMusician]

I found a way to use the half-note diamond notehead as a whole note, and have it centered:

1. In Engrave > Edit Notehead Sets > Diamonds > Diamond Noteheads, edit noteheadDiamondWhole.
2. Delete the whole-note notehead and replace it with the half-note notehead.
3. Change the X offset of this notehead to 2.
4. Add a text object with no text, and change its X offset to 2.
5. Add another text object with no text, and change its X offset to -9.

This effectively make these half-note diamond noteheads the same width as a regular whole note. It will have the following consequences, which may or may not be desirable:

• Ledger lines will be as wide as those for a regular whole note.
• Alignment with other objects will be as though the notes were as wide as a regular whole note.

[hugigu0]

Hello all. This problem with the bizar whole-note-harmonic glyph seems to remain an issue in Dorico 4, at least as a default behaviour. Or has anyone found a more permanent solution than the few workarounds in this thread?

[JesterMusician]

For harmonics, you can remove the whole and double-whole notes from the White Diamond Noteheads set, and for the remaining notehead, check the box “use for durations longer than and equal”. There should only be one notehead in the set, and both checkboxes under Duration should be checked.

[hugigu0]

This still leaves the harmonic notehead off-center, as can be clearly seen in the example you posted. This is the workaround I’ve been using for a few years now, but it’s obviously not good enough.

[JesterMusician]

If you want to center the diamond whole note, then you can create a duplicate notehead of the half-note, use for whole notes (and durations longer than and equal), and edit it as follows:

Set the notehead’s X offset to 1.10
Attach a blank text object, set its X offset to 1.00
Attach another blank text object, set its X offset to -0.10
Set the Stem Up SE X to 1.65.

The text objects widen the bounding box of the notehead so that it appears centered on a whole notehead and ledger lines.

[hugigu0]

Thanks JesterMusician! This looks a lot better now but still feels like a strange set of hoops to jump through for such a basic thing. And the design choice of the small asymmetric and off-center notehead as the default whole-note harmonic notehead is just mind boggling when everything else in the program looks like a million bucks…

[JesterMusician]

Here’s another option that’s easier to do and also provides a good result, in my opinion:

1. Remove all noteheads from White Diamond Noteheads.
2. Add noteheadDiamondHalf and noteheadDiamondHalfWide.
3. Set them to half note durations and shorter, and whole note durations and longer, respectively.
4. Edit them to be 120% scale.
5. Set their Stem up SE X attachment points to 1.20 and 1.68, respectively.

You may also want to do this for regular diamond noteheads, as this balances better with the default larger notehead size that Dorico uses, and also provides a slight protrusion beyond the staff lines when the note is positioned in a space, which is recommended by Gould. (If you do this, then you need to duplicate noteheadDiamondHalf in the White Diamond Noteheads set to serve as the quarter note duration and smaller, or else it will conflict with the notehead in the regular Diamond Noteheads set.)

[hugigu0]

Nice! I like this one even better! Thanks a lot, JesterMusician!

[Michel_Edward]

I happened upon your solution to the harmonics issue, it works beautifully, with the minor change that I set the diamonds to 110%. I found that 120% caused harmonics to be too close to, and even overlap with, the notes when needing touch-3 harmonics (as is the case sometimes with contrabass).

I still hope that we get a slightly lighter harmonic glyph native to Dorico, some day.
But this fix will do in the meanwhile.

[clario]

Thank you so much JesterMusician
you’ve been a great help to me today.