🎬 This article is a transcription of one of the excellent tutorial videos posted to the official Dorico YouTube channel.
Presented here in written form with the kind permission of its creator, Anthony Hughes, this tutorial is titled “How to Work With Bar Repeats in Dorico Pro 2″…
Hello I’m Anthony Hughes, and in this video I’ll be showing you how to use Bar Repeats in Dorico 2, the advanced music notation software from Steinberg.
Bar repeats indicate to the performer that the material in the preceding bars should be repeated: this notational shorthand can be very helpful to the performer as it can be easier to read and understand that the music is to be repeated exactly than to read multiple bars of written-out music.
Creating Bar Repeat Regions (0:32)
In order to create a bar repeat in Dorico, select the bars where you would like the repeats to be shown, open the Repeat Structures panel from the Notations toolbox on the right-hand side of Write mode,
and click Create Bar Repeat Region.
There is also a menu item for creating a Bar Repeat Region in the Write menu,
and you can use the Repeats popover — introduced in Dorico 2 — by pressing Shift+R, typing ‘percentage’ and pressing Enter.
Bar Repeats are denoted by this blue highlight, that indicates the extent of the region,
however if you’d rather not see it, you can disable it in the View menu, by unchecking Highlight Bar Repeat Regions.
Bar repeats automatically play back the music they’re repeating.
2-Bar, 4-Bar Repeat Regions (01:25)
Now, in this example, the bar repeats are telling the performer to play this single bar three times. If, actually, you need both of these bars to be repeated, then you can convert this to a two-bar repeat by selecting it, opening the Properties panel and changing the number of bars from one bar to two bars.
You can even create 2-bar repeats in the first place, by typing ‘percentage 2’ into the Repeats popover.
The same is true for 4-bar repeats, typing ‘percentage 4’ into the popover or using the property.
Grouping Bar Repeats (02:03)
If your music has a regular phrase structure, sometimes it can be helpful to show that structure by grouping bar repeats. In this example, I could set this property to group every four bars.
Even this is possible in the Repeats popover: for example I can type ‘percentage 2 comma 4’
to produce a two-bar repeat grouped every four bars.
Counting Bar Repeats (02:28)
To help performers keep track of where they are in a passage of bar repeats, Dorico will show a count of the number of repetitions at intervals above the staff. By default, it does this every four bars, counting the bar being repeated as 1 (meaning the third bar repeat will be number 4 and so on).
This is configurable in Engraving Options, which you can open with the key command Ctrl+Shift+E (that’s Cmd+Shift+E on Mac), on the Bar Repeats page. Here you can choose to display the bar count more or less frequently, and set the appearance of the number.
You can also override these count options on an individual basis in the Properties panel.
What’s more you can nudge the count numbers in Engrave mode using Alt plus the arrow keys, or by moving them with the mouse.
Consolidate Bar Repeats (03:23)
Finally, you can consolidate bar repeat regions in the same way as multi-bar rests, by opening Layout Options with the key command Ctrl+Shift+L (that’s Cmd+Shift+L on Mac), choosing the Players category, and in the Bar Rests and Multi-bar Rests section choosing to consolidate ‘Multi-bar Rests and Bar Repeats’.
Then, if you like, still in Layout Options, on the Bar Numbers page, you can check the option to ‘Show ranges of bar numbers under multi-bar rests and consolidated bar repeats’…
… I’m Anthony Hughes, thanks for watching.
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I very much hope you’ve found this video transcription to be helpful. If you have, please subscribe to OF NOTE and follow me on Twitter for ongoing music notation news and info. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Dorico YouTube channel to see many more videos like this one. ~robert puff