I do a lot of lead sheets for wedding bands, and here’s a feature that would be very useful to me.
I’d like to be able to do a one-two page song, where I have the first verse under the notes and the lyrics for any additional verses at the end of the song, instead of on additional lyric lines. I’d like to be able to attach chord symbols to those lyrics too, so that the reader could play the chart, and then continue to comp the vocals to the next verse off of them.
As a singing keyboard player, this would be super helpful in cases where I have some familiarity with the song, but don’t know it well (and the band might not know it at all), and would keep the charts more manageable for wedding band work, as compared to writing out multiple verses (or voices) with slight melodic variations to match the additional lyrics.
Basically, I’d like to have the ability to have a hybrid lead sheet and lyric chord chart as a single one or two-page document that would transpose as needed.
Doable in Dorico? Is this something others would find helpful too? Thanks!
This isn’t something that will be possible without a bit of hassle in the first version of Dorico (not least because the first version of Dorico won’t have a proper chord symbols feature, though it should be possible to approximate them with text, all being well), but we hope in the future to have features whereby you can choose to display lyrics either in line with the music or at the end as block lyrics, and perhaps it will be possible to make the block lyrics display with sufficiently wide line spacing that you could squeeze chord symbols in between them.
Thanks, Daniel. If it could be possible to have a sub-option within what you describe, where in addition to choosing to display the lyrics as a block (which I assume have been entered/correlated to notes, in order for this to be an option), one could choose to keep the chord symbols info attached to those bars as well, it’d be very helpful.
I’m hoping that you will add chord symbols as an update relatively soon, as I can’t wait to get Dorico, but really need this feature and need them to be transposable.
It’s certainly doable in Sibelius, with just a little subterfuge. And in MuseScore. Doubtless also in Finale. So I’m sure similar techniques will be possible in Dorico, when it gets chord symbols.
Staves can be hidden, text objects can be dragged. And chord symbols transpose even when dragged out of position. If you can’t work out how to do it yourself, ask in the forum for your current scoring software.
I’ve tried in Sibelius and haven’t found it easy to do. I can get 90% or where I want to be, but it takes time, and it’s difficult to edit afterwards if anything needs changing.
Indeed, we could hope for a more elegant method in Dorico. But I note that you don’t want a method of displaying the SAME lyrics in two different ways. We’s ideally need two things, the ability to clone objects so that editing one instance affected all of them, and the ability to attach objects to specific text.