Hi. I am new to Dorico - coming from FINALE like everybody else.
I am looking for a way to write alternate bass notes in lower case: F/c instead of F/C.
I found a two year old post addressing the same issue - apparently I am not allowed to link to that post here..
Has this issue been solved yet? This should really be a basic feature for a so-called pro application. I am using newest version (6) of Dorico.
Scaling down the bass note would work for C/c but not for A/a or G/g, so that is not an option.
Inputting as text instead of chords: I guess those “chords” wouldn’t transpose if you need to transpose a piece, or change to a transposing instrument. So that’s not an option either.
Is there a proper solution to this issue that I have not been able to “google?”
I really, really miss FINALE - the application, where YOU decided how to notate things - and if you didn’t like FINALE’s default settings, you could just change it.
If there is no usable solution for this, Dorico is useless for professional users in Scandinavia or lots of other countries.
I will probably need to look into Sibelius or Musescore, or just stick to FINALE for now and hope that Dorico might become more “mature” in the future.
But I can tell you that the development team listens to all user requests for new features. As this has been mentioned before, it will certainly be on their list for the future. (And that’s more than you could say about Finale, even before its demise.)
However, there are of course many feature requests all vying for attention.
There seem to be almost as many different standards for Chord symbols as there are users. Dorico already comes with 9 different preset styles, plus all the individual options. Several releases have included significant time spent on chord symbols.
Finale will indeed still work for the time being, and Dorico will keep growing.
I have to agree with you on basically everything you wrote - including MakeMusic not listening too much to user feedback.
However: All the way back to Finale Version 1 back in the late 80’s, you could do ANYTHING you wanted. no limits whatsoever. We’ve been used to that for 30 years. It’s really tough to have to put up with Dorico not letting me layout things the way I want to.
Yes, Finale’s great strength was that you could put anything on the page, and it didn’t matter what it was, or whether it made sense. But that freedom came at the price of having to do lots of tedious work by hand.
Dorico removes a lot of that work, but in order to help you, Dorico has to know how things work and have those options programmed in.
As you say, you can always just enter the chord as text, though that would be more work. I certainly remember spending hours setting up Chord Symbol libraries in Finale – and God help you if you wanted to change the font!
Having said all that, from a quick experiment, it does look like you can edit the Chord Symbols in Dorico to use lowercase. You would have to modify every type of chord, much like in Finale’s symbols Library.
I actually went there before creating the post. I can select the bass-note (In my case E) - but how do I erase it? simply pressing “Backspace” doesn’t do a thing (I am using MacOS btw). Can you give me a step-by-step guide how to delete the bass note and replace with the lower letter version? Thanks so much
Benwiggy. Thanks a lot for your inputs. You have some good points…
But on this one, FINALE is the clear winner: You can write: “C/e or C/E”, or “/e or C/e”, or “Sus or Sus4”. Finale will just leave it the way you entered it. It will know what you meant for playback (although FINALE is awful at playing back chord symbols) and it will stay the way you entered it if you transpose.
But… I am not blind. FINALE was buggy and complicated in many ways. I can see a lot of things that Dorico does smarter.
Maybe I am just “hit in the stomach” as I am working on my very first Dorico score, after watching some tutorials. It’s really just a one-staff lead-sheet with melody line, lyrics and chord symbols. And already I am encountering major issues about things that Dorico won’t let me do. What challenges will I face if I try to arrange an entire Musical Production Score in Dorico…?
I want to be able to choose if it should be “Am Am/F” or “Am /F” (the 2nd one is Dorico’s default).
I also want to be able to substitute “B” with “H” which is a normal things to do in Scandinavian/German.
Thank you SO MUCH. The part I didn’t realize was the Bin icon to erase the original uppercase E. For me, just press backspace once it’s selected would be the more “Mac-like” way to do it… Oh well, I shall try my very best to be patient, and not expect to be able to do things so flawlessly from day 1 that I can do in FINALE after 27 years of use…
I chose this autumn to try to dive into Dorico because I have some spare time in my calendar. And to be honest, I had a bad experience yesterday about entering chord symbols the way I want to Thanks again for your help benwiggy.
I tried to think of other issues I might encounter when entering chord symbols:
It’s unlikely that I would want to write C/G and C/g within the same project, so it’s okay if I can’t do that.
It’s also unlike that I would use “B” as well as “H” for the white key between ‘A’ and ‘C’ within the same project - so also not an issue. (BTW Finale would struggle with this too).
But in this “score” bar 1-4 is the same as 5-8 but written differently. I find it very likely that you would want to do both things within the same score. (Also note that I used Esus as well as Esus4)
If I enter Am/G in Dorico, it will automatically change to /G if the previous chord was Am. This is good in some cases but not always…
Also bar 9 and 10 is the same but written differently. It would also be nice to be able to do both within the same score.
Can you do these things in Dorico?
Cheers and much love from a FINALE user who will try to be good and patient learning Dorico
As you spend more time in the forum, the kinds of things that you are allowed to do will automatically increase. This is a feature of the Discord software which powers the forum.
I created a new Chord Symbol under Library->Chord Symbols for the sus without the 4. Just don’t name it something with sus. Here, named it foo. So Efoo created the second symbol. Or the opposite, set Engraving Options to use just sus, and add the custom sus4 symbol. Same goes for the maj7 vs ^.
Thanks again for your help benwiggy.
