User manual

Table Of Contents
Notes
Notes are shapes that are positioned on staves to indicate musical pitches. Notes are most
commonly shown with oval-shaped, round noteheads that are either lled or void depending on
their duration, but there are many different designs of noteheads that you can use.
Depending on their duration, notes can have stems that help indicate their duration.
In Dorico SE, a sequence of adjacent notes joined with ties is considered a single note of the total
duration of the tie chain, rather than separate notes. Note grouping is automatically adjusted
according to the prevailing beat grouping, which is normally set by the time signature.
RELATED LINKS
Inputting notes on page 164
Note spacing on page 362
Stems on page 814
Changing the notehead design of individual noteheads on page 637
Add intervals popover on page 190
Adding notes above/below existing notes on page 189
Bracketed noteheads on page 641
Ties on page 831
Note and rest grouping on page 525
Beam grouping according to meters on page 511
Notehead sets
A notehead set is a collection of related noteheads that together allow you to represent all the
different noteheads required for the different durations used in music notation.
A typical notehead set contains at least four noteheads:
A black notehead for quarter notes (crotchets) and shorter
A white notehead for half notes (minims)
A wider white notehead for whole notes (semibreves)
A wider white notehead with one or two vertical strokes on either side, or a square white
notehead, for double whole notes (breves)
Pitch-dependent notehead sets contain noteheads that vary according to the pitch of notes
rather than their duration.
In pitched notehead sets, there are different noteheads for different pitches.
For example, the Pitch Names notehead set shows the letter name and any applicable
accidental of each note within its notehead.
In scale degree notehead sets, there is a different notehead for each scale degree, relative to
the current key signature.
For example, the Aikin 7-shape notehead set uses a different notehead shape for each pitch.
NOTE
A single notehead can appear in multiple notehead sets. If you edit a notehead within one
notehead set, your changes affect the appearance of that notehead in all notehead sets that
contain it.
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Dorico SE 3.1.10