Dorico slurs and beams

[Fred G. Unn]

It was actually a collision with an accidental and a flat beam that started me down this path again. My current settings handle Ross pg 118 pretty well too.

ross118.png (86.21 KiB) Viewed 172314 times

[NeeraWM]

This gives so much food for thought!
The only thing I don’t like of Ross’s prescriptions is the 1 1/4 slant for 4ths and 5ths. It’s too big for me.
When straddling both is possible (note in space most of the times) I prefer 1 space slant.
When this is not possible, I prefer to have it sit-hang or hang-sit, thus with 1/2 space slant.
Thank you for advising on the order of adjusting settings.
I now recall the reason why I hadn’t shortened the quaver’s stems: on multiple voices it was looking very poor.
It’s a chess game, where your goal is… a draw!

[Fred G. Unn]

The only thing I don’t like of Ross’s prescriptions is the 1 1/4 slant for 4ths and 5ths. It’s too big for me.

I agree with you. I tried to get as close to Ross as I could, just to see what was possible, and then I actually went back and slightly softened a bunch of the angles for my own defaults.

[NeeraWM]

I have a dream: beam slant sets!
You open the editor, set your ideal slants for every interval and up-down stem and it gets applied whenever possible!

[NeeraWM]

4) Once you have decided on all of the above, then it's time to play with beam angles. As everything is interrelated, I really wouldn't recommend adjusting the angles until after you have all of the above settings as you like them. If you're unhappy with the results, and go back and change one of the earlier settings, just assume all of your beam angle settings will need to be thrown out and reconfigured too. As with the other settings, don't pay attention to the actual values here, just pay attention to the results. Obviously some beam angle settings may be nonsensical, but are fine if they get the results you want.

By the way... have we ignored until now that all the beam angle settings are applied to groups of more than 2 notes?!
We are trying our settings with Ted Ross page, but will it then work in practice when more than 2 notes are involved?
I'm still struggling to get what I want in my pieces, and change way too much manually so, in my experience, it doesn't.
Any change I make to my pseudo-stable settings and things get worse, not better... so I go back to the lesser evil.

If I change the length of the stem for beamed notes, it gets better for some situations and way worse for others.
As you said, changing the beam angle has very little effect per se.