I’m working on a few small projects with Dorico, including a baroque aria in which Bach uses dotted eighth-sixteenth rhythms as a shorthand for triplets. The movement goes back and forth between triplets and dotted rhythms, but there’s no question (in my mind, at least) that all the dotted rhythms should be assimilated to triplets. It would be truly fantastic if there were a way to tell Dorico this… somehow… so that the music could align “properly.” I realize this is esoteric and only SCORE could actually accommodate this notation, but if there were some way to designate this semantically as a property, it would be really useful. Example of the music is attached.
I don’t think I’m explaining this very well — but I know it’s also a moon-shot request, so maybe it doesn’t matter!
(I’m continually impressed by Dorico’s notation and the many, many things it does perfectly. I knew it was the future from the moment Daniel started blogging about it, so I’m thrilled that it has reached the point when I can use it to produce at least a subset of my work! Can’t wait for more!)
Again, I’m not entirely sure what you want, but you can already do clever things like type [2+3]/8 for a time signature that shows as 5/8 but beams as a two and a three.
… and depending on the tempo, they might be played as 5+1 sextuplets against the triplets.
If you want to leave the notation as dotted 8th + 16th, you can tweak the playback to make them match the tuplets if you want. There are 480 ticks per quarter note in Dorico, so changing 1/3 to 1/4 means altering the time by 1/12 of 480 = 40 ticks. So you want -40 in the Playback End Offset of the dotted 8th, and -40 in the Playback Start Offset of the 16th.
To play them as sextuplets, change the minus 40s to plus 40s.
There are also instances where straight quavers written against triplet quavers should also be matched rhythmically. You would never want to space these accordingly.
Can somebody walk me through how to do this? I am in the middle of creating a virtual score of a Händel opera, and I need the score to show dotted 16th + 32nd, but the playback to play 16th + 32nd.
I don’t seem to be able to input the 3:4 and the 1:2 bit.
Then hide the triplet bracket and number, and the rest. This breaks the beam, so you’ll need to rebeam across the hidden rest. I had to un-tie the quarter note in order to select the dotted eighth on beat 3 to reconnect the beam. Fortunately it’s a repeating rhythm, so once you’ve done one you can copy it and repitch.
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