Copy Paste ONLY Chords

Dorico
1

I don’t write classical music. I’m a professional arranger doing contemporary pop or big band charts, so chord symbols are important and almost always occur on every bar of several instruments (rhythm section)

I’m currently working on a typical (yech!) contemporary song which uses the same 4 chords throughout the entire song… chord change every 2 beats, so 4 chords over 2 bars.

I wrote the bass line which does vary from verse, to bridge, to chorus, but it’s still the same 4 chords. I added the 4 chords to the first 2 bars of the bass. So, I do NOT want to copy the notes with the chords.

Now I need to be able to copy those two bars of JUST chords throughout the song (as well as the other rhythm players). I have read multiple articles in the manual and forum and Copy/Paste Chords doesn’t seem to exist (copy/paste ONLY the chords).

Please help.

Paul Vesco

2

Select the chords (manually with CTRL/CMD + Click or by selecting measures and filtering for chord symbols).
Then use ALT/OPT+ Click at the desires starting location to copy them successively to each set of measures.

3

Hi Derrek,

Thank you for your response, but it does not work:

  1. I am on a Mac, so I don’t have an ALT key…. I tried several different combinations, but none work.

  2. Those are all the steps? No extra steps or having to pick an option? Or COPY or PASTE?

Thank you for your help.

Paul Vesco

4
  1. Alt = Option ⌥ on Mac. (Some Mac keyboards also say “Alt” on the key.)
  2. Yes, Option-click copies whatever is selected to where you click. No clipboard involved.

Bonus: Once you’ve duplicated your 2 chords once, select them all so you can make more copies faster.

5

Those are all the steps. One only has to know the conventional interpretation of CTRL/CMD and ALT/OPT as presenting alternatives for Windows/Mac keys.

6

Excellent! Thanks!

7

One only has to know the conventional interpretation of CTRL/CMD and ALT/OPT as presenting alternatives for Windows/Mac keys

As I’m sure you know, on a Mac there are BOTH a CTRL and a CMD key. So when I see a Windows CTRL, I press CONTROL on the Mac, not the COMMAND (Apple) key.

However, now I know the ALT key is the same as my OPTION key on the Mac.

That is good information and I thank you very much for your responses…. All is good and working… and I greatly appreciate the fast help…

8

Just so you know, chord symbols used to be selected with passage selections; by which I mean that when you selected a range of bars by clicking the first bar and shift-clicking the last bar, chord symbols used to be picked up. The problem with this was that given that in Dorico chord symbols are typically system objects, if you miscopied it would paste over any existing chord symbols at the paste location, with no visible warning that anything had gone wrong.

The current settings mean that it’s a click or two more to copy and paste chord symbols, but harder to do so by accident.

9

Enter the chords for those two bars and a chord for the first beat of the next bar (it can be anything as it will be overwritten). Select them. Type R (for Repeat) as many times as necessary. Any notes present will not be affected.

Repeating chords
Repeating chords1183×520 57.1 KB

2 Likes
10

Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of this?

11

Ya can’t get ‘em all, @Mark_Johnson. 99.9% will have to do…:wink:

1 Like