Is it intentional that when selecting notes and using the “Add 5th” tool, Dorico adds a perfect 5th for every note except B and B♭, for which it adds a tritone instead?
In my opinion, this doesn’t make much sense and is quite counterintuitive from a workflow perspective. It could also easily lead to mistakes when relying on the tool to quickly add a perfect 5th.
Interestingly, as you can see in the video, A♯ (enharmonically equivalent to B♭) does produce the correct perfect 5th.
I’d be interested to hear what you think. Is this intentional, or am I missing something?
It seems like 5 adds a 5th with the same accidental as the bottom note, which indeed makes a diminished 5th for B and Bb, and a perfect one for the others.
I think when you type an interval like 5 without asking for “perfect”, it works in a diatonic way: only naturals in C major; B and E flat, and the other ones natural in Bb, etc..
Which means that you’ll always get a diminished 5th for the leading note (B in C major, A in Bb, etc.) I just tried and indeed, you get a Eb above the A in Bb major:
When there are bottom notes that are not part of the Key, like in your example, I’m not exactly sure how it’s supposed to work, but maybe, as I was guessing, the added note keeps the accidental of the source.
A lot of musicians forget that there are at least two different ways to achieve any ‘tritone’: diminished 5th and augmented 4th. In any key, the ‘add interval’ trick is going to follow the key signature, unless you tell it different. In the key of C, if you go up a 4th from F, it’s going to give you a tritone to B natural unless you tell it different. Etc.
My point was (or meant to be) that the thread had been sounding like the only way to get a tritone was via a diminished 5th, and it isn’t. It depends mostly on how they’re going to ‘resolve.’
Actually the thread was about how to avoid the diminished 5th, or rather why does the diminished 5th occur when using shift-I 5.
And I think that has been answered.
