Whole note rests - half note rests?

Dorico
#1

When I have a piece in 4/4 with multiple players, and I enter some whole-note rests (by pressing 8, comma, A (for example), the system where I’m entering the rest gets two half-note rests whereas all the other voices are auto-filled with a whole-note rest. When I move to a different system and continue entering rests, this behaviour moves to that system:

Is this intentional? I didn’t see any option to control this in the notation or engraving preferences.

(Just in case that’s relevant: If I enter a whole note, it remains a whole note and is not split into tied half notes).

1 Like
#2

Why are you entering whole note rests?

#3

I wrote a transcription of a song, starting with the bass line, and the bass line begins in the 9th bar, so I entered 8 empty bars at the start. That’s how I noticed this.

Interestingly, the first bar contains a whole note rest, the following bars are double half-note rests.

Also, there is a four-measure drum solo in the middle of the piece, and since unpitched percussion isn’t yet supported well, that’s another reason to make do with empty bars at the moment…

1 Like
#4

I think Pianoleo is surprised that you input rests, since it is not necessary to do it in Dorico : the program fills the spaces with rests when needed.

#5

I know it does (at least when there are other voices that contain notes), but that was not the case several times in my project. And the question remains - if I do enter a whole note rest manually, why should that be divided?

#6

Actually, you might be considering adding bar rests. In write mode, on the right panel, you will find it in the “bar” category (between insert bars and create barline)

#7

Ah, thanks, I didn’t know about bar rests and will look into them. I still find Dorico’s behaviour surprising, but at least it led me to this better solution :slight_smile:

#8

I tried your method using whole note rests in 4/4 and I get the same result as you. I then tried the same method in 2/2 and got whole note rests (but at the start of the bar rather than centred). I then tried the same thing with dotted half note rests in 3/4 and got quarter note rests (three per bar as you’d expect).

I think I’ve discovered that if you try to create bar rests using this unorthodox method, Dorico gives you rests in whatever beam/note grouping pattern the meter dictates. This is odd but possibly more useful than actually giving you bar rests (since the way you’re supposed to create empty bars is by using the Bars and Barlines tool, or by typing Shift-B and entering + followed by the number of bars you want).

#9

Turn on force duration to enter whole rests.

#10

This topic title nudges me to ask a question that has been lurking in my reading here. Maybe it has been discussed before, and if so, I apologize, but my searches didn’t turn anything up.

Are terms like “half note rest” standard somewhere? (Not in the UK, I imagine, as they would say minim in the first place.) In my own musical education and experience, something is either a note or a rest, and to string them together is a tiny bit gauche (I would teach Introduction To Music students not to say it, for instance). But maybe my education has been inbred, and many people actually do say it?

#11

Terms such as “half-note rest” are common in the U.S. where the terms “half-rest” or “quarter-rest” would be very confusing.

#12

That’s fascinating, @Derrek. Thank you for the information. Growing up in Chicago, and getting my music degrees from Indiana University, I never encountered that usage – it’s calling something a “note-rest” that would have confused us! But experience has taught me many times over that there are other usages just as ingrained as the ones I know. Just recently I discovered that the pronunciation “ahk-tayv” is considered the proper one in parts of the US, and I had literally never heard that before, in years of attending musicology conferences all over the country. There’s always more diversity than we can predict.

#13

For what its worth, “half-rest” and “quarter-rest” are what I’ve always heard in New York and North Carolina. Maybe its a West Coast thing.

1 Like
#14

For what it’s worth, @Pietzcker is, to the best of my knowledge, German, @MarcLarcher’s French and I’m British.

I just went with @Pietzcker’s terminology :wink:

#15

+1. I’m not sure I’ve ever called something a “quarter note rest” before.

1 Like