Dorico slurs and beams

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benwiggy
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Re: Dorico slurs and beams

Post by benwiggy »

Fred G. Unn wrote: 03 Oct 2021, 23:37 Ben, did you tweak any of the grace note slurs where there's a single note in your K330 example? Or are those your defaults? I'm getting much worse results than you with my default grace note slurs so was just wondering if there was some setting I was missing.
Yes, the defaults were so poor that they are all manually altered. Also the mid-staff tie in 13, the 'editorial' slur in b. 12, and the tie into the flag in bar 30. Apart from those, all slurs are defined by the settings.

I have managed to achieve some improvement to grace note slurs by setting the vertical offset to 1 space, which simply stops it going too high. Here are some grace-note slurs with no manual adjustments:
Screenshot 16.png
Screenshot 16.png (14.44 KiB) Viewed 133998 times
Those values work better for some intervals than others. TBH, for the large intervals, like b.5, I've since used LV ties (though that's going to bite when playback is supported!)

I did try to test the Ross examples with the settings I'd created from following the Henle example (but not quite as methodically as you've done). It doesn't always match (and I dare say that Henle don't follow Ross, either); but where it doesn't, it's still pretty good. Henle seems to favour beams at a smaller angle, with fewer jumps across a space.

My beam settings fix the "inconsistent horizontal beams" complaint, which you may remember on the Dorico forum. I've had to fiddle with stem lengths, Stem Shortening rules (whose options I don't quite understand), as well as the beam intervals. The latter are all much lower than the factory settings.
Screenshot.png
Screenshot.png (48.28 KiB) Viewed 133998 times
There's definitely some things that need developer attention: particularly grace note slurs, slurs to flags, and a few other odd corners.
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Fred G. Unn
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Re: Dorico slurs and beams

Post by Fred G. Unn »

Ok, I decided to play along as well. I wasn't really interested in trying to copy fonts, so these are just my standard fonts and sizes. There was no manual spacing adjustment other than a couple of Voice Column Index settings, no manual adjustment of any slurs except single grace note slurs, and no manual adjustment of any fingerings other than the Inside/Outside slur property checkbox. Beam groupings were modified as needed to match the original. Bar 12 was the only exception to slur editing as it needed moved to fit the editorial parentheses. Bar 13 had some manual adjustments to the tie and upstem half note. The rest in bar 14 was moved manually too. I don't typically use the "double thick" repeat barline, but did it here to match the original.

Image

Some comments:

1. The white space in the first system is terrible. I would manually move the dynamics and bring the bottom staff closer to the top if I was really publishing this. I left it alone as I was trying to do no manual spacing adjustments.

2. Not a fan of the beaming with the 64ths in bar 6. Too many wedges. 64ths are too close to the dot of the previous note so I would end up moving these manually.

3. I just posted on the Dorico forum too, but there seems to be either a bug or a missing setting to control the amount of space following a start repeat. I could obviously move these manually, but there is too much space after all the start repeats. If the setting exists, I haven't found it.

4. The fingering in bar 24 does not match the original. You can only have one fingering per note so it was impossible to have 52 attached to the grace note. Obviously I could add it to the downbeat and move it, but was trying to minimize workarounds.

5. The slur in bar 24 looks bad colliding with the top line of the staff. I'd adjust that manually too.

6. Crescendo in 25 should be moved up. I guess it's grouped with the p in the next bar.

7. Slur in right hand 3 bars from the end is goofy and should be manually adjusted.

8. Crescendo in last 2 bars could be tweaked to look more like the original. I just left my default settings. Slur to nowhere on the last beat needs tweaking too.

9. I didn't try to replicate the oval bar numbers style since I don't really care for it, but I don't think ovals are possible in Dorico. "Show bar number at start of system for bar split over break" appears to not work when a repeat sign is involved.
benwiggy
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Re: Dorico slurs and beams

Post by benwiggy »

I've reported the bug with bar numbers/repeats/breaks to Daniel, amongst other things.

I left off the fingering, partly because that's editorial and 'proprietary', and partly because I was interested only in the beaming and slurring.

Things like the inter-staff spacing can be done manually, and I dare say that a pretty close copy could be made. I'm not wild about the oval bar numbers, either.
benwiggy
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Re: Dorico slurs and beams

Post by benwiggy »

Here's my latest version, which does a bit of tweaking to the vertical spacing, and to a few more of the slurs (since last time).
Mozart Piano K330 - Full score 001.png
Mozart Piano K330 - Full score 001.png (719.11 KiB) Viewed 133957 times
Also, here's my version laid over the Henle image (shown in red).
Screenshot 20.png
Screenshot 20.png (1.17 MiB) Viewed 133957 times
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John Ruggero
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Re: Dorico slurs and beams

Post by John Ruggero »

3D glasses anyone? We could see Mozart in greater depth! ;)

It's excellent, Ben. Great job!
Last edited by John Ruggero on 05 Oct 2021, 02:12, edited 2 times in total.
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JoshNichols
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Re: Dorico slurs and beams

Post by JoshNichols »

@benwiggy, would you be willing to share your parameters for the slurs? and other house-style things?

It's gorgeous.
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OCTO
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Re: Dorico slurs and beams

Post by OCTO »

A fantastic topic, wonderful to follow, thank you benwiggy!
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benwiggy
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Re: Dorico slurs and beams

Post by benwiggy »

John Ruggero wrote: 04 Oct 2021, 21:01 It's excellent, Ben. Great job!
Thanks, John. Coming from you and your wonderful eye, that means a lot. Though, of course, any fule can copy someone else's work: the trick is knowing what to do in the first place!
JoshNichols wrote: 04 Oct 2021, 23:16 @benwiggy, would you be willing to share your parameters for the slurs? and other house-style things?
The text font is Monotype Modern, which (apart from the specialist fonts like Nepomuk, Ionic, Old Music Standard, etc) seems the closest mainstream type to traditional punches. The music font is Sebastian. Most noticeably, Henle's noteheads appear a lot bigger. I'll have to see if it's possible to get close to that without affecting spacing.

(Grr. Just noticed I've missed manually adjusting that slur in b. 12.)

Slurs
I started with Fred's slur settings, found here:
https://forums.steinberg.net/t/octave-s ... /143356/42
with a few alterations, which may not be ideal for all occasions.

Slur middle thickness was increased to 1/4 spaces.
Height of a short slurs was 5/8, and Length 2.5 spaces, though that makes actually very little difference from 3/4 and 3.

Like Fred's, I've increased the fraction of the slur for the 'shoulders' significantly: I've done 1/2 for short slurs and 1/3 for long slurs (though I haven't really tested that with long slurs. I haven't touched the flat slurs, either.)

The other major changes are Horizontal offset from centre of notehead is MINUS 1/8. Grace note Vertical offsets are all set to 1 space.

Stems
Shortened stem length for eighth notes is 2 7/8. I did try 2 9/10ths at one point: the idea being that even the tiniest bit under 3 spaces changes things.
Shortened stem lengths for shorter notes is 2 1/4.

Stem Shortening rules were -3 and 3. Shortened Stems rule was ON.

Beam
Here are my beam intervals.
Screenshot.png
Screenshot.png (73.36 KiB) Viewed 133913 times
They are a bit mad, because a 6th is smaller than a 5th. But it seems to work in this document, anyway, e.g. bb. 5 and 7. There is a sort of 'cycle' of beam angles as intervals get larger: they 'reset' to the next staff line.

I've raised with Daniel all the places where Dorico doesn't copy ideally, no matter what the options, and where manual adjustment is required. He's already aware of most of them, and they're on the List.

Here's my Dorico project file. I dare say that these values may need further refinement, or tweaking for different kinds of music. There's also a second Flow where I've just messed about with beaming examples. (I've reset the fonts to Bravura/Academico.)

(My mother gave me this piece to play when I was about 9 or 10, and I was trying to find it to start playing it again, but I couldn't remember its K number. I found it anyway, based on "Mozart piano sonata in C")
Attachments
Mozart Piano K330 copy.dorico.zip
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Fred G. Unn
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Re: Dorico slurs and beams

Post by Fred G. Unn »

benwiggy wrote: 05 Oct 2021, 09:26 Here are my beam intervals.

They are a bit mad,
I gotta admit, I'd not entirely clear how these settings actually work. A beam angle of Straddle-Sit is 1/4 space for example so beam angles can only actually be adjusted in 1/4 space increments, yet an 1/8 space increment has an effect in this dialog box, as you have discovered too with your 3/8 setting. A while ago I played around with trying to reproduce the beam angles in the UE Style Guide, as they have a pretty comprehensive prescription for angles, and I got the best results with some nonsensical numbers like 7/8 space. Odd.
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Fred G. Unn
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Re: Dorico slurs and beams

Post by Fred G. Unn »

The other thing that is somewhat confusing to me is that they clearly had one beaming concept in mind during development, then changed course and went a different way at some point before release. Here's an example from Daniel's development blog where he was discussing beam angles. I also added the current factory shipping angles, my own angles (which are changing daily right now, LOL), and angles using Ben's file he posted above.

Image

I personally prefer the Steinberg development angles to the current factory default angles. Just a guess, but perhaps they had feedback from certain publishers that they were trying to get to use Dorico and made some changes at their request. If these settings were originally intended to work a certain way then changed midway through, perhaps that could explain why the beam slant dialog box is so confounding.
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