I would love to have something like the old mirror tool in Finale. Any time you had bits of music that appeared more than once in a score, you could just make ‘mirrored’ copies of the original measures, and from then on, anything you did to the original music was done to the mirrored copies as well.
I’m scoring a piece right now that has a guitar part that just repeats every two measures, for the entire piece. The way things are now, If I want to make modifications to this part, I have to do them to every copy in the whole piece. No fun.
I have asked for something similar in the past but it was not well received. I had asked that, for example, in a cappella choral pieces, where a change in a choral voice would update the “for rehearsal only” accompaniment voice when using reductions to create that practice-only accompaniment.
I do find great value in being able to link musical phrases so that, when repeated, any change in the original would update mirrored copies when
But cues can only “mirror” music vertically, and you have to jump through several hoops if you don’t want them to look like cues. A true mirror function would also let you mirror music horizontally – for example, writing out a repeated section.
I see it more as a composition tool. You have a 4-bar theme (or several), then a bunch of mirrors (aliases) that are perhaps rotated, inverted, retrograded, half-time, transposed, reversed, etc, or any combo.
Change the theme (themes), and you have a different piece with the mirrors adapting their transformations to the new theme.
I like the idea of it as a composition tool. But it would be a practical and very useful feature, for me in almost everything I do, from jazz lead sheets to large orchestral works. Seems to be the kind of smart thinking that Dorico’s developers are known for, so I’m unsure why, as you say, they’re not that positive about the idea. Let’s keep this idea alive, maybe someday they’ll implement it.
It’s unclear from what has been said here whether it was the developers themselves, or just forum users, who expressed an opinion. Typically, the devs are back-breakingly polite and receptive to suggestions.
For instance, I would have probably said something like “you mean that tool in Finale which didn’t work properly and was eventually removed from the app…”
It should be observed that at some point Finale abandoned this feature, a reason I kept the old 2014 version installed because I used it in development versions. It makes sketching substantially more facile.
Dorico’s explode to (hidden) staves comes close though requires human intervention, precision, and something close to perfection.
This works very well in Cubase, where the copies can be at different pitches, and have different dynamics and any other playback parameters you can imagine.
But this depends on Cubase’s architecture, which supports ‘blocks’ that contain midi notes. It is the blocks that are repeated and linked.
Whether this is something the Dorico team would like to take on, I don’t know.
Another option is to have a sophisticated ‘phrase search’ or ‘search and replace’ function.
I am often wishing for search and replace on musical motifs that may or may not be in the same key or pitches as the original. Being able to search and replace, for example, all B-flats with B-natural in either the entire flow or a selected region would be really nice. There may be a way to do that but I have yet to discover it.
