A little trial with chord symbol regions

I have a score that includes Piano and Accordion, and chord symbols. I want:

  1. chord symbols between the staves of the Piano (Engraving Options ✓)
  2. only one staff for the Accordion (Remove Staff ✓)
  3. chord symbols showing in one region of the Accordion part, and
  4. not showing in the Piano part for that region

After some pounding I realized Dorico won’t show chord symbols below the upper staff of a grand-staff instrument with the lower staff removed – not too surprising. I briefly considered showing them all above the upper staff, but that takes too much vertical space in this Piano part. So I moved all the Accordion music to the lower staff (with a treble clef), and removed the upper staff instead. That takes care of #3.

I am very grateful to Fred for his recent post about #4 above. But then one more thing: I wanted to shorten my chord symbol region – and could not select it because there was no bar across the top! I tried closing and re-opening, quitting and relaunching … Eventually I figured out that the region applies to the whole instrument, and I had to restore the upper staff again in order to select the region and shorten it, then remove the staff again. Now finally I have what I want.

If there’s any FR in this, it is something like:

  • With the between-staves chord symbol setting and the lower staff removed, allow chord symbols (and their region handles) to display above the remaining staff?

But I suppose this will become moot when we can define custom instruments. I am somewhat eager to play with the XML file, but I don’t have time on deadline today. Thanks for listening.

Definitely +1 for me too. I might be wrong, but I seem to remember Daniel saying something about how chord symbols are stored with a staff in the file structure that makes changing the behavior here definitely non-trivial.