I’m having a bit of a conundrum about how to enter a percussion marking. I had been hoping it would be one of the improvements in 1.2.10 (an absolutely phenomenal “maintenance” update, btw), but alas, it was not to be.
Pic attached for the marking. I know the topic has come up before in a few different threads, but reading through, it seems that at the moment, the current method for inputting such a marking is “with some difficulty and/or tedium” or using slurs instead of tying, which can introduce its own tedious adjustments (and also, they just don’t look the same). I guess I’m just wondering if indeed this is still the case and also if there are any plans to implement a better way in the near future (or rather in the next version, which I know is slated to be released later in the year, or perhaps an upcoming one soon after that).
For percussion, the convention is that a stroke that ends a roll is tied to that roll, but notated without the tremolo marking. For that part, the solution is to simply switch to engrave mode and toggle the single stem tremolo property. Not ideal if you have lots of them, but perfectly doable. (Also of note, this breaks the playback, as removing the tremolo from the second notehead seems to remove the tremolo property from the note group entity entirely for playback. There is a fix, but it’s something of a workaround, and can take a bit to set up in your percussion maps and percussion playing techniques pages). One last thing to note is that depending on the meter and the note values, you may need to use Force Duration to keep the tie from consolidating the two notes into one.
Aaaanyways, the problem now is getting accents to show on both noteheads. As far as I know, while you can tell Dorico to put an articulation on either the first or last note in a tie chain, there’s no way to tell it to do both. I think this means the accent has to go in as text, which is, again, doable, but not ideal at all if you have lots of them, given the way Dorico spaces text versus articulations.
So, unless I’m mistaken, the marking I’ve attached, and others like it, are only possible by tying while forcing duration, switching modes, selecting just the second notehead and adjusting its tremolo property, switching modes again, adding a dummy articulation as text, switching modes again to make sure it’s spaced right, and finally making sure that it hasn’t respaced the system or staves in any undesired way.
Given how common of a marking this is and that it is standard practice, it would really be lovely if a fix made it into the next version (I mean, honestly, I could use it now, but I know y’all have dozens of features about which users have likely said the same). If you’d like my (unsolicited ) opinion, the issue is that ties in Dorico behave the same way for percussion that they do for all other instruments, but they really shouldn’t. Dorico’s underlying behavior of combining tied notes into one entity works because on any other instrument that is truly what’s happening in the performed music (and it’s honestly quite lovely that Dorico does it this way). For percussion though, a tie really acts almost like a slur, but looks like a tie, and it might be worth considering having Dorico’s underlying logic deal with them similarly.
Thoughts, comments, disagreements, etc.?