Slowly working my way through all the new videos and I’m absolutely blown away and impressed with all the new features!! I’ve never been so excited to pay for an upgrade (or wake up at 5AM to install it before work). Bravo to the Dorico team!!
One feature I was hoping for was an option to automatically hide chord symbols in empty staves. For example if the bass player in my rhythm section has 32 bars rest, I wish I didn’t have to manually select and hide those chord symbols. It’s especially tiresome when doing large-scale projects. My current project is ~60 arrangements/flows and it’s time consuming removing chord symbols for resting instruments. I really thought the updates to chord symbols (love the chord symbol regions. Amazing feature!!!) would have covered this.
Am I missing something? Maybe it’s already implemented and I missed it. If not, is this on a future roadmap? It would be a huge time-saver for me!
Thanks,
J
I don’t think there’s a way to do it automatically, but I think the chord symbol regions are already quite flexible! Just do it the other way around, select the passages with music and apply the chord symbols regions. Otherwise, I don’t think there’s a way to do it automatically.
Yes, you should change those players not to show chord symbols throughout but to only show them in chord symbol regions, and then create chord symbol regions over the parts at which you want chord symbols to display.
Thanks for your reply Daniel,
My issue is with rhythm section instruments (Piano, drums & bass.) I want them to have chord symbols throughout, but often one or more of the rhythm section instruments are resting at the beginning of a tune/flow. At around 60 flows in my current project, it means I have to go through each rhythm section layout and check for empty measures, then select and hide chords symbols so the layout has a multi rest instead of a bunch of blank bars with chord symbols. That task is tedious and seems counter to the Dorico philosophy. I would love to see an option for something like “automatically hide chord symbols in empty measures”. I know this topic has come up before (I couldn’t find it…maybe on Facebook?) so I know others have requested this type of functionality.
Thanks again for all your hard work! You and your team have a lot to be proud of! Bravo!!!
If it would make sense to only add chord symbols where they’re relevant, you now have the “Chord Symbol Region” option available to you.
Hello Pianoleo. Thanks for the reply. I really appreciate all your contributions on this forum.
I forgot to mention in my case there’s a guitar too, so either the guitar, piano or bass are playing chords and in various places (usually during intros, and codas) one or more instruments drop out. So, going in and adding a ‘chord symbol region’ during the writing phase seems equally as cumbersome as removing chords during the engraving phase. It just seems (to me) that having an automatic feature for this would make sense.
I should add that I love the option for chord symbol regions and chords over slash regions. This will be a huge help for instrumental solo regions.
Thanks again!
Could it, in the future, be possible to have a chord symbol region only being shown in the part, not in the score?
In a bigband arrangement there is quite often an open solo section where it might be decided during rehearsal or even during the performance which players do the solo, so each player would need the chord symbols in his music, but having them on all staves in the score would unnecessarily clutter the page, instead a boxed text telling the conducgtor that changes are provided for all players would suffice there.
Thanks for the feedback. We’ll certainly think about this.
