In my ongoing attempts to learn Dorico I keep running into strange stuff. Would appreciate your help!
First and foremost, I would like to be able to attach Dorico files to this forum, so other forum users can open it up natively, and see where I screwed up. In my experience with Sibelius that is really much more useful than just posting screen pics or asking general questions.
In the meantime, please take a look at the attached screenshot. Questions:
a. What is the deal with all these strange rests, and can I at least delete them, or rearrange them to a more appropriate position?
b. In bar 11, upper staff, why canāt I add multiple notes to the G thatās already there?
c. In bar 10, how can I flip the stems in the light blue voice in the upper staff?
d. And here it gets really strange ā bar 14, why does it suddenly go to 6/4? At some point - canāt remember when - I set the time signature to 3/4. Why is Dorico picking another time signature? How do I change it back to 3/4?
2a. The extraneous rests come from polyphonic voices which begin or end mid-measure and sometimes when copying music from other locations. You need to choose the adjacent note in the same voice and go to the notes and rests properties panel and click Starts voice or Ends voice. It isnāt always easy to see which voiceās rests youāre trying to hide but the colour coding helps with this. So to hide those whole bar rests in bars 7 and 8 you might try selecting the last 8th rest (red) in bar 6 and selecting ends voice in the properties panel, or the first rest in bar 9 and selecting Starts voice. I canāt be sure without seeing the file. In bar 10, select the dāā in the RH and select starts voice, etc. BTW, you can be in either Write or Engrave mode to do this. Moving the rests is also done in the properties panel at Rest pos.
2b. You should be able to add extra voices under the gāā in bar 11. How you go about this depends on how youāre entering notes (MIDI keyboard?) and how you want to divide the voices polyphonically. If you want to add a 3-note chord under the gā', in Write mode, select it and press Shift-V to add the extra voice. If you want to add notes to the existing note, just double-click the note so youāre in Write mode and you can see the caret and then play the chord. You can even do it the way Bach originally notated it with four separate voices (using Shift-V to add each one). Unfortunately you canāt yet add the arpeggio line in Dorico.
2c. If you want to flip stems, in either Write or Engrave mode right-click (Ctrl-click) any of the notes, any of the stems or the beam and select Stem/Force Stem Down from the contextual menu.
2d. I donāt believe Dorico changed the time signature to 6/4. What probably happened is that you deleted the barline by accident. To add it [again] select the first note after where you want the barline and press Shift-B. This will bring up the popup window where you can enter the character | (on my keyboard itās next to the Return key). The following update to Dorico is supposed to make it less easy to select (and delete) barlines inadvertently.
I was playing with this myself to see how far I could get but I gave up, as there are too many things at the moment that Dorico is unable to do.
The lack of ornaments. AFAICS we have a choice of only five. In the Aria of the Golberg Variations we need six different ornaments and the turn is the only one available. I even tried adding them as text; theoretically that should be possible and the necessary ornaments are certainly defined in the Bravura font, but Dorico wouldnāt accept the input.
Thereās no arpeggio line.
The secondary beam grouping is predetermined and you canāt change it. In bar 4, the 16th beam should go through the entire first beat and not break to the 8th halfway. You could argue that the number of lines should equal the duration of the secondary group (this is indeed a setting in Notation Options/Secondary beam groups) but thatās beside the point. All the editions Iāve seen as well as different manuscripts extend the 16th beam throughout the beat and AFAICS Dorico wonāt let you override its way of doing it. This affects bars 4, 7, 17, 21, 22 and 26.
Just a quick comment on the whole hiding-rests-via-Start-and-Ends-voice thingy. I can see the musical and notational integrity of this approach but surely a simple Hide Rest (hide anything, come to that) button/keystroke would be far more user-friendly?
Agreed! Hopefully theyāre working on this for one of the two updates coming out this year.
Just for practice, I entered the whole aria and it actually took a lot longer than Iād expected, partly because of working out hiding and positioning rests. Shifting the rests vertically takes longer than Iām used to (in Finale) and there are some other problems I was unable to solve, like spacing at places. The beam angles arenāt always good, either, and that takes a lot of tweaking. And I miss the ornaments.
Hereās what I made of the Golberg aria. I left out all the ornaments since the turn was the only one I could have entered. Rest positioning was a lot of work but doable. Iām still bugged by Doricoās secondary beam grouping, especially since I canāt find a way to change it. There are still some beam angles Iād tweak, as well. I canāt, for example, understand Doricoās beam angle in the last 32nd group in bar 19. Why does it angle the beam an entire space while the same figure in 16ths in the first beat of bar 27 gets a nice, shallow angle? I even tried moving all the pitches up and down but the beam angles between the two figures remained just as inconsistent. Also, I canāt figure out why the grace note spacing is inconsistent. Usually itās very good, but why is there so much space between the grace notes and the main notes in bars 14, 19, 23 and 26? This last one is particularly curious, since it almost looks as though itās trying to space the graces notes in the two staves to be proportional (giving the 8th more space than the 16th), which looks very strange. And itās frustrating that this canāt be changed.
āBeaming / Beam Togetherā in the right-click menu doesnāt create any secondary beam groups. I discovered that by accident - I agree itās not the obvious thing to do.
I think the problem is to be that Dorico thinks the flag on the grace note collides with the accidental on the main note (and possibly also with leger lines).
In the engraving rules there seem to be several relevant options:
Accidentals, āGap to left of leftmost accidentalā
Notes, Grace Notes, āMinimum distance between right grace note and rhythmic itemā
Spacing Gaps, āMinimum distance between adjacement rhythmic itemsā
But I havenāt played with this enough to find values I really like.
If you create some groups of grace notes, it looks like that is what itās doing, but I agree there should be a way to stop it and have the independent grace note spacing on different staves. It looks really silly in an orchestra score where there are several staves between the ones with the grace notes.
You could argue that it makes sense for grace notes played before the beat (why else would you write grace notes with different lengths) but that is irrelevant for baroque appoggiaturas played on the beat.
You can use the āSplit secondary beamā property for this. You can specify how many beam lines should appear, up to one fewer beam than the number used to either side of the split. If you have e.g. 32nd notes, therefore, you can specify either Auto (which will produce the number of beams appropriate to the duration of the whole group), or 8th (to show a single primary beam), or 16th (to show two primary beams).
32nd beams very often end up with an angle of a whole space because that is normally the only slant that does not produce wedges on at least one of the beam lines. If you allow Dorico to widen the gap between 32nd beams (so that they are half a space apart rather than a quarter of a space apart), then it can produce shallower slants without producing wedges.
Iām trying to use the āSplit secondary beamā property but I canāt get it to work. In bar 4 thereās nothing I can select which will draw 16th beams between the first F# and the G. This also goes for bars 7, 21, 22 and 26. In bar 17 I can get 16th beams but not 32nd beams, which is how itās notated. The Beam Together function in the contextual menu doesnāt seem to work, either.
Thanks for the info about the beam angle. Iām still a little baffled by the occasional grace note spacing.
Iām honestly not trying to bump this post back up, but Iāve set the Engraving Options/Beams to widen the gap on 32nds between beams but it has no effect in the score. Is there something else Iām missing?
Putting aside for a moment editorial concern for reproducing the original beaming of a great composer, I think Doricoās default beaming of this melody is excellent and extremely sensible and readable.
The grace notes in bar 26 are interesting: Dorico appears to be aligning simultaneous grace notes by their rhythmic values, in microcosm. Is that musically useful?
As for the beam angle in bar 19, instead of widening the beam gap, perhaps there is a preference setting to allow the sort of āwedgeā that a nicer angle would produce (which engravers abhor, but which has never bothered my eye in decades of music editing).
Well, the first part (up to the repeat barline) is done ā see attachment. I think Iām slowly getting the hang of it.
Two questions:
Bar6, bass clef, second voice (amaranth color) - Iād like to change the quarter note tied to an eighth note to a dotted quarter note, but Dorico wonāt let me. Am I missing something?
Thereās a lot of different voices and colors - take a look at e.g. bar 11 - itās almost like one of those ācoloring books for adultsā that are popular these days. Iām trying to be consistent in using the same color for what I think is the same voice as Bach had intended it; not just for this piece but in general for other works etc. Helps me greatly to keep things consistent, and itās also good for e.g. analysis purposes.
Is it possible to pick a specific voice / color from a drop down menu, or is it just shift V after note input and then take whatever is available? Are the colors assigned to specific voices, and if so, where can I find a chart?
You need to force the duration. If, before you enter the note, you select the clamp sign in the palette on the left (or press O), Dorico will notate the entered value. Donāt forget to press O again to deselect Force Duration, otherwise youāll prevent Dorico from doing its thing automatically which could lead to unwanted results.
If you need a second voice, after pressing Shift-V, you can keep pressing the V key to cycle through the other voices Dorico has available at that moment. Usually you have a choice between an upstem and a downstem voice, which you can see by observing the number and the note icon next to the caret.
P.S. Donāt forget to remove the slashes in the grace notes. Bach didnāt notate them that way and theyāre not acciaccaturas but should be played on the beat. You can do this before the fact by selecting grace notes (slash) and then alt-slash or after the fact in the properties panel. Careful also of the relative lengths of the appoggiaturas; some are 16ths, some are 8ths. When I did this, I entered the correct ornaments as text by creating a paragraph style called ornaments which uses the Bravura font at a certain size, and then I copied them from PopChar and pasted them into the text window in Dorico. A bit of a workaround but it works until Dorico supports a completer set of ornaments.
Hm ā¦ Iām still confused about the āvoice endingā.
In bar 10, there is an ugly conflict between the rest in the amaranth color voice in the bass cleff, so I want to turn it off immediately in the properties window, but Dorico wonāt let me.
In bar 15, I end the green voice after the barline. And yet, in bar 17 it reappears (see the two rests).
And in bar 16, I again try to end the amaranth colored voice in the bass line, yet Dorico wonāt let me.
In bar 10, just select the LH a and select Ends voice in the properties window. You can tell they belong to the same voice because theyāre the same colour.
In bar 17, youāve created extra rests which donāt necessarily belong to a [useful] voice. You should start by deleting the first red rest. Youāll see that all three red rests disappear. If you then delete the second green rest, the other two will disappear as well. As a result, you donāt need to end any voices in bar 16.
I know, Doricoās treatment of voices can be difficult to fathom sometimes and it really helps if youāre careful and methodical about entering the voices in the first place. Iām still getting used to it, but itās a great system once you get it under your belt!
I keep struggling with bar 10 though, I can click on the quarter amaranth note in the bass cleff, but I have no options in the properties windows to change anything.
