Notation with editorial note colors in Dorico
Published: November 9, 2022I get some very interesting transcription jobs from time to time, and bundled with them often come a few unique puzzles to be solved. One particular project I did recently was transcribing the piano parts from a live performance. No big deal–I do this quite regularly (see my post on piano transcription to read more!). However, this specific performance was captured on VHS tape and transferred to YouTube, so needless to say the audio and video quality was quite poor. The piano was also very low in the mix, so only about 50% of the notes could be heard clearly.
As I have written before, transcribing is typically a mix of 1) correctly hearing the notes played, and; 2) old-fashioned deduction. In this case, this transcription was going to involve quite a bit more of the latter (i.e., guess work) to come up with a plausible rendition of what the pianist had played.
I informed the client of this caveat prior to starting the project, and he requested that I make the notes that were “deduced” a different color to differentiate them from the actual hearable notes. This presented me with an interesting challenge, because there were going to be hundreds, if not thousands of colored notes mixed in with the normal ones, and individually coloring each and every one of them would be a huge pain.
I came up with a solution using Dorico where I would first put the piano transcription in two staves: one with the clearly hearable notes, which would be black, and another with the deduced notes, colored blue. Once they were all colored (in bulk), I would simply move the blue notes up two staves (shortcut Alt-N) so they would appear perfectly integrated with the black notes on the same grand staff. Incidentally, Dorico usually handles this type of note-moving quite elegantly and seamlessly merges moved notes with existing ones without creating weird extra rests or voice layers.
Now on to coloring the notes blue: my first instinct was to just simply select the bottom staves in Write mode, go to the properties panel, and select a new color for all the notes. However, I discovered that Dorico does not color the tied-to notes when this option is selected, so I needed to dig deeper to find a solution.
Dorico does not color tied-to notes when applying a custom note color in Write mode.
A quick search of the Dorico forums revealed that Dorico does not yet treat tied-to notes as the same entity for the purposes of applying a note color, so I would need to color them first in Engrave mode. However, after selecting and coloring the notes in Engrave mode, when I tried moving them to the staff above, the result was not pretty. Not only would the notes not properly move up, they weirdly created strange invisible zones in the destination staff. What a mess that would be. Time to find a better solution.
I then decided to create a custom notehead set based on the default noteheads, and applied the blue color to the entire notehead set. I then just selected everything on the bottom staff, applied the notehead set, and moved everything up to the destination staff. Boom. It just worked. Thanks, Dorico!
Blue noteheads created in a custom notehead set