Assumed audience: People using the Dorico music notation software, particularly people still getting the hang of how Dorico “thinks” about things like key signatures.
A friend sent me a Dorico file this morning, wondering why her key signature change wasn’t working. I suspected (and soon confirmed) that the issue was that it didn’t initially have a key signature — because by default, Dorico creates new projects in free time and without a key signature… and no key signature happens to look the same as being in C Major. This little video shows the issue in practice and how to solve it:
There’s a good reason for this — Dorico “thinks” first of all in terms of pitch and duration, not in terms of bars and keys, and that makes it far easier to write atonal or open meter music, while also making it straightforward to layer key signatures and time signatures on top of that. And as I show (albeit briefly) at the start of the video, there are easy ways to start a new piece in specified time and key signatures. But this is easy enough to mess up that I hope the video is helpful to folks out there!