In the attached file, I’d like to have capo chords displayed below the main chord symbols on the top staff throughout, but any attempt to do so causes a crash.
This is a fresh file from Dorico’s own template btw., so it shouldn’t be corrupted.
Any ideas?
never_going_back_again2.dorico.zip (980.3 KB)
I get an error opening file message.
Ah, sorry, attached the wrong one. Here’s the right one:
never_going_back_again2.dorico.zip (980.3 KB)
Edit: Updated the main post as well.
Seems to be OK. Set Layout Options to show chord symbols above specific players. No crashes.
never_going_back_again2-x.dorico (710.3 KB)
Thanks so much, Janus, but I have to have Show chord symbols: Above top staff of system selected, since I hide the guitar part in several places.
Also, Dorico seems to display the man chord symbol in italics (or parentheses), not the capo chord.
I’m not sure I fully understand, but you can still hide the guitar part by simply hiding the chord symbols (in the property panel) for those passages.
Thanks! You’re right. That will work. However, the only problem is that Dorico displays the capo chords and main chords differently for the guitar and vocal parts. In my mind, this is wrong (see attached), and the transposed capo chords should always be displayed in parentheses/italics, as in the vocal part.
It seems the program features the appropriate chord symbol given the key the instrument (vocal) player sees.
Yes, it seems so.
Erroneously in my view and experience.
Knut, can you please outline the specific steps you’re taking to reproduce the crash? It would also be helpful if you could do Help > Create Diagnostic Report and attach the resulting zip file here.
In the attached project, it’s just a matter of trying to enter chords while keeping Show chord symbols: Above top staff of system and Show Capo Chord Symbol above/below Main selected to reproduce the crash.
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (1.2 MB)
Can you please try updating to Dorico 4.3.30 to see if this resolves the problem for you?
Thanks – I’m afraid it looks like this is a bug in Dorico 4 that we didn’t squash before we moved on to working on Dorico 5. Dorico 5 includes a number of other improvements related to the positioning and alignment of capo chord symbols, so if at some point you are thinking about updating to the new version, you will benefit from these changes and improvements at that point. I’m sorry for the inconvenience caused.
I see, thanks!
Do you know for a fact that both the bug and the constant representation of capo chords, irrespective of instrument transposition has been fixed/included in Dorico 5?
Hi Knut,
I think the main problem in this project is that there’s more than one way of setting up the transposition for a guitar, and the one you’ve chosen isn’t the right one for capo.
There are two common situations where people want a guitar to be transposed. One is capos, and the other is detuning (where e.g. the whole guitar is tuned down by a semitone or a tone). For capos, the transposition for chord symbols needs to be set in the player, by choosing “Capo Chord Symbol Definition”:
This means that in Layout Options you want to choose “For notation”, not “For notation and chord symbols” - the latter is what you want for detuning.
That was the culprit! Thanks so much for the help, Richard!
I wonder if there is a way to make this functionality more obvious or intuitive, but perhaps it’s just a matter of reading the documentation more thoroughly.
I agree that the UI here is a bit complicated. We’d like to simplify things but it’s not easy as there are several use cases we want to support and they’re similar but not quite the same.
I see. Maybe things could be made more obvious with some small changes in the naming of options?
Anyway, at least now I know how it works (I think). 
