That’s good to know, but it would be nice to select a range of music and have Dorico detect the chords and actually enter them into the score as chords. For many people, it would be easier to have the software take a first guess. It is easy to delete extraneous chords. And not too difficult to edit chords that weren’t exactly what we wanted.
As far as changing the notes wen the chord changes, everyone should note that Cubase has extensive capabilities in this area. The needs of the typical notation user may be different from the typical DAW user. Often this chord-based note shifting in Cubase is used for arpeggiated synth lines. That happens a lot in techno music, but it isn’t such a common thing in notated music. Nonetheless, Dorico should be advancing in this area.
I have also advocated for chord-awareness as we are nudging notes up and down in Dorico. Dorico actually does seem to have some smarts in this regard, but I believe there is an opportunity to be even more useful it it could fully consider the named chords that are in effect at any particular moment in the composition. And an option for color coding notes according to their compliance with the chords (green = notes explicitly defined in the chord, amber = notes in the scale implied by the chord, red = outside notes.) For example if the chord is C7(b9), the coding would be as shown in the attachment
Logic and Pianoteq both show chords - although outside of the obvious ones they regularly disagree on what the chord is. I sense that’s where the"easy" part of this development goes out of the window. The Logic display is brilliant - top, centre and big. The Pianoteq display is more like a game of “Where’s Wally” - you know it’s up there somewhere …
Perhaps a simpler “version” of this request would be to have a toggleable “chord track” that sits below the chord symbols. The chord track would not be part of engraving but just there as a reference track to play with voicings. Both the chord symbol and chord track would stay sync’d using the existing recognition paradigm but you could edit either at any time. Even though it doesn’t span multiple voices or instruments it provides a valuable reference for voicings that can be copied to other parts.
In Dorico 4 there is a new feature that will add chord symbols based on the selected music, which might be worth exploring. It is included in Dorico Pro 4 and is also meant to be included in Dorico Elements 4, though due to a misconfiguration it doesn’t actually work in Elements 4 at the moment: this will be fixed as soon as possible.
As I continue to work through my studies, Dorico continues to be so useful. It’s quick, amazing UX, and helps me rapidly work through exercises.
Today the teacher showed an example where he revoiced a chord because after applying a mechanical voicing it resulted in a minor 9th that was undesirable. That got me thinking… wouldn’t it be great if I could make a selection (across staves) and not just recognize and generate chord symbols, but perform any kind of desired analysis, say from a plugin ecosystem or simple rule builder. I would most definitely run the script that detects minor 9ths.
This would just be one application. It would be great to be able to “hunt” for anything you may want to quickly identify in a passage (minor 2nds between the top two voices, for example, or 3rds below a certain low register to address potential muddiness). Even just highlighting the notes and applying a temporary/analysis/annotation label would be enough. Sort of like a “teacher mode” overlay if you will that can be toggled the way the instrument filter can be toggled.
I know this might be pushing the boundaries of Dorico’s original mission — which we all know is engraving — but the fact remains that Dorcio is so useful in the learning context that addressing some learning features might make market sense now that Dorico has delivered on it’s original promise.
As a student, I certainly have my fingers crossed!
I agree. Dorico is already able to identify chords but only within a single staff. I do a lot of sax quartet arranging with bass and drum parts and it would be awesome to be able to generate chord symbols based on all four parts. I’ve been doing some of my initial writing in StaffPad, on the iPad which has that feature but it would be great to have that right inside Dorico.
It does identify across the whole score and it’s very useful. Assign a shortcut for quick access. I’d been looking for this capability for ages, and there it was, right under my nose!
It took a while to figure out the key words to search the help. For anyone else looking, in Dorico 5:
Edit > Notations > Chord Symbols and Diagrams > Generate Chord Symbols from Selection