Another way to enter lyrics?

Dorico
1

I was reading the 5.0 manual (pretty sure that one) about entering lyrics and saw the comment that although you can enter lyrics without the melody being in place, it’s much easier if it is. But I haven’t found anything about what that alternate method is, where you don’t have the melody yet.

In my approach to songwriting, I tend to write lyrics first, so I mostly know the rhythm of the words and can place them in bars at approximately the right place, but with Dorico, as soon as I hit space to advance to the next word, as I remember it, it jumps to the end of the flow. To solve this, I first create a flow full of nothing but 1/8 or 1/4 notes at the same pitch, like 70 bars worth, then enter the lyrics on top of whichever note I think is closest. Once I have the general structure of the lyrics, then I worry about getting a melody that works and I iterate between lyrics and notes, moving things, changing words, etc.

So does anyone know what the alternate way of entering lyrics is, when you don’t have the melody yet? I would like to try it out to see if works better for me. A manual reference would be fine.

2

Lyrics have their own rhythmic structure, which doesn’t change automatically when the notes are modified. When you enter lyrics to existing notes, they silently copy their rhythms, but not the other way round. As you say, you could enter the lyrics to a nonsensical string of preliminary eighth notes or whatever. However, when you start composing ‘for real’, and likely add totally different rhythms above the lyrics, the lyrics will not snap to the new notes, but stay put. It’ll become a lot of manual work. I think, to be honest, that it’s better to do the writing of the lyrics outside Dorico first (maybe even simply on paper), and then only add them to the music once it has been composed.

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