I’m very impressed with the new chord facilities, and so far they have worked very well for me. I found myself able to set up things as I want them without too much difficulty.
My only suggestion for an enhancement would be to enable Dorico to cope better with big band charts where all the instruments can have chord symobls on the solo section (so they know what to improvise over) but not in the rest of the chart. At the moment I’m having to hide chord symbols manually to get this, which is a bit cumbersome.
I second that (using chord symbols only in the sections where soloing over changes is required), but I also have to say that the new features are very impressive.
Good job, thanks a lot!!
Greetings SV
Yep the chord symbol implementation is awesome. So much better than the superseded notation programs… Easy to get good results straight away but plenty of options to customise as well.
The concept of having the chord symbols appear on all the parts is a great idea and time saver but i agree with the points made previously that there should be a dialog box that allows you to specify exactly in which bars the chord symbols appear in any given part - really hope this appears at some point in the future.
At the moment it works as a temporary solution to hide the chord symbols manually, can be achieved pretty quickly.
I did run into one interesting conundrum with the universal chord setup… I was preparing a part tonight for a tenor sax player who plays keyboard in certain sections of a piece. he asked for the chord symbols in those sections to be written in concert pitch on the top of his Bb part. This is obviously not conventional… but I tried doing this by transposing just the chord symbols in the tenor part, but that transposed the chords on all the other instruments as well. Guess there are other solutions involving adding another stave, but interesting to run straight into that on the first night of use.
That is a minor and unusual issue so no big deal and I gotta say, Dorico is so well conceptualised and with this update the implementation is really coming together (for jazz musicians especially) . I bought Dorico on day one but today is probably my real day one as i can start using it daily and also import back catalog stuff.
Slash notation is the main thing missing for me now, hope that will come next update or two.
Kudos to Daniel and the team on this update, amazing work.
You could assign your tenor player a keyboard instrument as well, and swap instruments at the sections you want in concert pitch. It will give you a key signature change if you do, but at least the chords will be right.
Thanks for the great update. I continue to love working in Dorico. I don’t know if this was mentioned or supposed to be the case but I had to assign shift Q for the chord pop up menu. It was not assigned by default in my program.
This will be because you have your own key command overrides. You can reset to the default shortcuts to get them back. In the future we’ll hope to find a way of inheriting new key commands defined 7 by the app that don’t clash with your own overrides.
I really never use chords in the music I work on, except for maybe a very rare occasion here or there. In playing around with it today, I have one SMALL suggestion.
The popover is one if the best aspects of Dorico, and here is no exception. Except for the fact that it is possible for the Popover to hide the Chord line that you are entering. I would suggest that for the chord popover only, maybe move it a little higher above the staff. I entered 3 chords on 1 measure that had a rest in it, and it moved fast enough that could not see that the chords were entered, because the popover covered them up. That is the only thing I would give my 2 cents towards.
To quickly hide chord symbols in the sections where they are not needed, i.e. so that they are shown only when the part is open for solos, you can click in the first bar the chord symbols should be hidden, then Shift+click in the last bar before the start of the solo, choose Edit > Filter > Chord Symbols, then set the ‘Hide chord symbol’ property for all of the selected chord symbols in one step.
We will definitely think about how else we could make it easier to show chord symbols only for solo passages, but the above steps should take only a few seconds (admittedly, a few seconds per part).
Thanks Daniel. I was thinking that if there was a way to link visibility of objects in the full score to visibility in the parts, then it would be quite simple to select all the relevant chord symbols in the full score and hide them, which would then be reflected in the parts automatically. This might be a generally useful thing to be able to do.