Chromatic Notation

Hi !

My question is the following :
Can Dorico be used to produce Chromatic Staffs ?

Is it possible to remap the pitches so that each note has its own space on the staff ?

Is it possible to recolor the note heads in a 6-6 pattern (one color for each Whole-tone scale) ?

Is it possible to display different line patterns for the staff ?

Thank you

1 Like

Welcome to the forum, Guillôk. Dorico does not currently support chromatic notation, I’m afraid, but we haven’t ruled out the idea of possibly supporting it in future.

1 Like

Out of curiosity, does anyone actually use this sort of notation? It seems to me that the development of western music has been so closely linked to the development of notation that creating a new system for the reading of old music would actually make that music harder to read, not easier.

Thank you Daniel for your reply !

“Out of curiosity, does anyone actually use this sort of notation?”

I do and a bunch of others that you can find on the google group “musicnotation@googlegroups.com” do also. However the main problem at this point is the lack of editing software that can produce chromatic notation. We use Lily Pond but it’s a really time consuming method and therefore for any player already fluent in Traditionnal Notation, it’s not worth the effort even though TN has its flaws.
As a guitar player what drives me to chromatic notation is the consistency in the way the intervals are displayed on the score. I could read intervallicaly relatively well on chromatic scores at day 1 without prior extensive training.

Sorry for the delay in my response!

1 Like

“Out of curiosity, does anyone actually use this sort of notation?”

I use exclusively my own chromatic staff system when composing on paper, and have been for the last 18 years. There are a number of advantages for the music which I personally write, though I agree that most composers would find little need to relearn a new system. I do think chromatic staves are a better system to read music as well as write, but that’s another discussion, and the history of music notation has more to do with inclusivity of universal understanding (based on previous technologies and traditions) and paper real estate (minimizing the space on the page the score inhabits). Chromatic staves have to do with true representations of relational distances and in my case the ability of a score to be read relationally whichever direction the paper is held (turning a chromatic staff upside-down creates a inverse-retrograde without having to process accidentals).

I truly desire more than anything a notation program which makes it simple and easy to input chromatic staff systems as easily as traditional notation, particularly so that I could input exactly as I write, and convert it to traditional notation simply by selecting a different staff system. Ideally I’d love to be able to also create scores where each staff could have different systems (the way most notation programs can switch between percussive staves, TAB and traditional staves with ease.) In Lilypond I can do it, but I hate writing in LP unless it is a score already finalized on paper exactly as I want it and all I need is a pretty printable version. I can use Finale to do this in a super annoying and pain staking use of custom percussion staff, but it creates so many problems in staff layout, and playback, that I rarely feel brave enough to give myself the headache of doing so.

And yes, of course, it is a rather small fraction of users who have a need for this, so I’m not surprised that Dorico has not included this possibility so far. However I would add my name to the list of users, even if we are few, that requests this feature to be integrated, customizable and simple. My work requires it.

1 Like