Cue suggestions

The Suggest Cues section of the Cues panel is divided into the following sections that help you find useful places to input cues:

Resting for

Allows you to specify the resting period for players after which you want to input cues.

The resting period is specified in absolute time rather than in bars or beats. This is because meters and tempos can change many times throughout a flow, and music can be partially or completely meterless, whereas one second always has the same duration. Dorico calculates time using metronome marks in the project.

Specifying an absolute time ensures consistency in the approach to finding places where cues might be appropriate.

Rehearsal marks

Allows you to consider/ignore rehearsal marks when determining the resting period.

Rehearsal marks often coincide with new sections or other landmarks in the music, which can be obvious to players without needing extra cues. By default, rehearsal marks are ignored as they do not always act as signposts for the musical structure.

Cues

Allows you to consider/ignore cues that already exist between notes played by the destination player when determining the resting period.

A cue that occurs immediately before an entry in the destination instrument is always ignored and is never included as a suggested location, even if you choose to consider cues.

However, orientation cues which serve to help the player keep their place during extended rests, but do not immediately precede an entry, reset the timer if you choose to consider cues.

Update

Allows you to recalculate cue suggestions based on your Resting for duration and inclusion choices for rehearsal marks and cues after you have changed values.

The names of the flow and layout that were active when you last updated the list of cue suggestions are shown below the Update button. This allows you to see at a glance to which flow and layout the suggestions shown in the table apply.

Cue suggestions table

The list of suggested cues is presented in a table. The table contains the following columns:

• Instr.: the destination instrument that has been resting for more than your minimum specified duration

• Bar: the bar containing the first entry of the destination instrument after its rest period

• Sec.: the length of time in seconds the destination instrument has been resting before the entry shown in the Bar column

You can click each column title to arrange the table according to the values in that column.

• Instr.: click to show instruments with suggested cues in the order in which they appear in the score

• Bar: click to show entries in ascending order, earlier bars down to later bars

• Sec.: click to the show the length of resting period in descending order, longest period down to shortest period

Click rows in the cue suggestions table to navigate directly to that location. By default, an area with an equivalent rhythmic duration of 5-10 seconds prior to the entry in the destination instrument is highlighted. The highlighted area is not a specific recommendation for cue length, but it can be a good indication depending on the musical context.

If you create a cue at a location suggested in the cue suggestions table, that suggestion is automatically removed from the list.

You can click Ignore in the action bar at the bottom of the table to hide suggestions where you do not think a cue is appropriate.

Note

If you later click Update and regenerate the list, hidden suggestions can reappear.

Highlight suggestions

Highlighted areas before entries in source instruments are shown Highlight suggestions is activated, and are hidden when it is deactivated.

Playing instruments list

Contains the instruments that are playing in the 5-10 seconds prior to the entry in the destination instrument currently selected in the cue suggestion table, to help you determine which instrument to use as the source instrument of cues.