Hi,
I am really happy with the combination of Dorico 4 and Scoring Express Jazz Fonts to mimic the style of the New Realbook (Sher Music) - with a few little tweaks you can come really close to the original. I need to write sheet music into this style for a customer.
To get as close as possible to the original chord symbols, I want to change the appearance of minor chords „Mi“ to the style used in the New Realbook: as in the Scoring Express templates, you get two capital letters and the „I“ with serifs, in the original this looks slightly different.
I made a mimic of the first systems of the chord style sheet in the New Real Book Volume I in Dorico: As you can see in the attached PDFs , nearly everything looks pretty the same, with exception of the MI-Cords. I changed the appearance of CMI (red Chord symbol) manually for one chord and would like to apply this change for all chords using „MI“. I know there is a way to change chord types in general, can someone help me to achieve this?
Thanks!
Chord symbols New Real Book Sher Music original.pdf (173.3 KB)
Ex. 1 Chord Symbols (New Realbook Sher Music).pdf (58.1 KB)
You should be able to do this in the Library > Chord Symbols dialog. Type a suitable chord symbol that contains the appearance you want to change in the box at the top left of the dialog, and add it to the Project Default Appearances list – don’t worry, you can remove this again in a minute.
Now select the “mi” part of the chord symbol in the preview on the right. You should see a number of different appearances for that “mi” component appear in the grid below the preview, and the current one will be selected. Click the pencil icon in the action bar to edit that appearance. Make whatever changes you need to make, and OK the editor.
You can now remove the chord symbol you temporarily added to the list of Project Default Appearances, and confirm the parent dialog.
You should now find that whenever you create a chord symbol in this project that uses that “mi” appearance, it should automatically use your edited appearance instead of the default one.
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Thank you Daniel, this worked perfectly! I would like to use this Default Appearance in every project using handwritten New Realbook Chords. Can this be done only with creating new templates from the current project or is the another way?
I have to say that one main reason for changing from Sibelius to Dorico apart from the software itself is the great support I get everytime when I have a question or problem that I can’t get solved! This is really great!
You could use the Library Manager (Library > Library Manager) to bring these default appearances into the existing Scoring Express templates (which reside as regular Dorico projects on your computer within the Project Templates folder at:
Windows: %APPDATA%\Roaming\Steinberg\Dorico 4
macOS: /Users/your-username/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 4
The Scoring Express also puts these in Documents\Scores\Scoring Express, so if you ever start from there you’d need to update those similarly.
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Yes, been through all this. It is not consistent in the results obtained.I appreciate you attempting to help though.
What an unbelievably convoluted pain in the arse though!!!
This needs to be a simple one or two click process. I simply don’t have the luxury of time to waste with this. Sibelius makes it real simple. This is a disaster and renders Dorico worse than useless for arrangers, like me, working commercial and under pressure of time.
Thanks for your contribution to this discussion though. I do appreciate your willingness to help.
Just to add here that I’ve been corresponding with Phil through private messages and we’re moving along the right track. All of the adjustments he has wanted to make bar one (increasing the size of the 6/9 digits) has been possible to make via the Engraving Options dialog without needing any individual overrides.
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