Critique new user's chord workflow

Dorico
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Finale refugee here. Piano instructor / jazz musician. Bought Pro right away and the benefits of Dorico’s paradigm shift are obvious! Much gratitude for the folks in this forum (and especially mod Daniel). What I’ve been reading here the last two weeks, along with Steinberg’s thorough help files have got me pretty much where I want to be.

However, there are some quirks when working with chords – namely the relationship between the dialogs of Project Default Chord Symbol Appearances, Edit Chord Symbol Appearance, and Edit Chord Symbol Component. Quirks that the documentation doesn’t always make clear, and it’s frankly only because of some of the thoroughly detailed posts by FredGUnn that I now think I know what I need to do. (Thank you Fred!)

Some questions / observations about my workflow. Tell where if I’m wrong, what I could do better, please…

Although you can indeed change the appearance of a chord symbol globally via the Edit Chord Symbol Component dialog, this is ONLY true if you are changing something that appears in “component list” of the Project Default Chord Symbol Appearances dialog, i.e. something highlighted in blue.

Question: what does it mean when something in this component list has a red triangle?

One must enter a root in the Project Default Chord Symbol Appearances, just to be able to edit a component of the chord, but the root doesn’t matter. This isn’t intuitive. Why not just be able to type “maj7#11” under “enter a chord symbol”? That would underscore that the changes made here should affect all instances of it, not just with the root you arbitrarily chose (but again, with the caveat that what you’re editing is a component that appears “blue” as above). This is not a complaint as much as a question…. I must be misunderstanding something here? What is the reasoning behind having to enter a root?

So with my font choice, here’s how one particular chord looks:

chord
chord800×310 15.2 KB

As far as I can tell, there is no way to adjust the spacing (kerning) of the two “1”s in “#11”.

sharp11
sharp11800×512 45.3 KB

Thus, I must enter Edit Chord Symbol Component, delete the “#11” and reconstruct it with a “#” and two individual “1”s as so:

newsharp11
newsharp11857×549 49.6 KB

Although this works, no matter how I scale the glyph, I can’t get my new sharp to match the appearance of the original sharp. If I switch to “Unicode” it seems to help, but I am sure that SMuFL is what we should default to, yes?

In Edit Chord Symbol Component, I understand that when on the “Glyph” tab, the “Range:” pull-down narrows down to a subset of the font chosen, in this case, Bravura. Where can I go to see all these Bravura glyphs all in one place, organized in their respective ranges? Just for my own edification.

Similarly, when on the “text” tab, from where does all of the “preset text” originate? Why would I want to use something from this (extremely long) pull-down here instead of just typing in “enter text” area?

And it always defaults to “Bar Repeat Count” for “Style:”…this is only because that font style is alphabetically at the top of the list, I assume, and thus is a bug? (Seems if it were to default to anything it would be one of the “defaults”)

Back to my custom “#11”… Tell me if this is a true statement – because the chord component “#11” is not one of the kinds that appears in blue, I am not able to make this customization globally. What I’ve done here will only affect future chords of the exact same type, and only with whatever root I used in Project Default Chord Symbol Appearances in order to enter Edit Chord Symbol Component. However, if I was lucky enough to be wanting to change a component that is indeed listed in blue, that change would be reflected in every instance of a chord using that particular component. In other words, if “#11” appeared in blue (it doesn’t), and I changed that “#11” by entering the Edit Chord Symbol Component via having entered “Fmaj7#11” in the Project Default Chord Symbol Appearances dialog….I could then change it in any way I wanted, and then that change would be reflected not only in Fmaj7#11, but also Cmaj7#11, and furthermore, even G7#11 or Eb9#11 or F#13#11…i.e., anything that uses “#11”?

Obviously, the latter scenario is ideal. Please confirm that since I will want to be changing many components that aren’t in blue, I have no recourse but to do a bunch of individual edits. I know one can edit “userlibrary.xml” as a time-saving work-around, but this is frowned upon by the devs – so hopefully there are plans to make this process smoother?

And finally, can someone explain what’s going on in this video? You’ll see a new font category for “Chord Music Text Fonts” be created anytime I adjust a component of a chord from the Edit Chord Symbol Appearance dialog. Surely this is not behaving as intended?

And here is a copy of my project file from which all these questions / images comes from:
Heyoke.dorico (869.4 KB)

Thanks in advance for any help! I’m so happy to FINALLY (…pun intended) be in the modern-age of scorewriters. For my uses, I will be messing with these chord dialogs a lot and want to thoroughly understand what’s going on, thus this novel of a first post.

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Sorry, perhaps uploading an mp4 doesn’t work.
Here is a link to the video:
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AmliEzvxepLKhc9Q_eMykGqMQoS-0w?e=nkFMbh

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Hi @redunzl, Welcome to the forum.

To be honest you know it already I think, I’m impressed, and yes there are some limitations with the chord symbols, so far as my knowledge goes I think, all the things you write are correct.

There are quiet a couple of threads now about the chord symbols and the limitations are 100% clear to the Dorico team I think. Daniel said this:

For what it is worth, I for myself decided to go the way off only make edits that do not need to be done to all roots. I consider it to much work for all roots and I wait untill there is update that makes our chord symbol life easier.

If I was you I would consider to use another font with better results for the #11.

About the video, I also think that is strange behavior. Not a big problem, but not something you would expect.

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I hope the Dorico team do this!

Chord customization is a must!

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There is a lot of Chord customization, but in some cases it is not enough. You can get a very good result at the moment and for most people it is OK.

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Yes Maarten, you are right. But an easy way of doing certain chord symbols alterations for all the roots at this moment is a very time consuming process that could be enhanced. The system is very good, only needs an easy and flexible way to create chords the way the user wants.

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Completely agree!!!

Not without creating overrides for all roots. One of the main reasons I’m using my current default font is that the #11 kerning is more acceptable than most other fonts.

+11
+11879×481 25.3 KB

This is just a bad design in the editor IMO, resulting from it being reused in too many unspecialized locations (Music Symbols, Playing Techniques, etc) and is also completely undocumented as far as I can tell. See all those accidentals in the panel when you first open the editor? Yeah, Dorico doesn’t use ANY of those in the chord symbol suffix, so forget them. Instead, depending on your Engraving Options / Chord Symbols / Design / Scale Factor settings Dorico will use the composite comp.csymAccidentalSharp for 76% and up, or comp.csymAccidentalSharpSmall for 75% and lower. You can select and add these from the Composite tab. I have no idea how they expect anyone who doesn’t hang out on this forum to know this.

sharp
sharp472×628 49.2 KB

The order in the dropdown matches the order on the SMuFL website, which I find easier to browse.

This has been a complaint of mine for years. The overwhelming majority of the time the user is going to want to use Chord Symbols Font, so why not just default to this?

All this is true, assuming you’re only working through the interface. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at what else might be possible. I had tried to do this some time ago and couldn’t figure it out, but haven’t looked at this lately.

No idea why that is duplicating in your video. Cool tune though! I have Gnu High on vinyl.

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Thank you Fred & Maarten for confirming that my understanding is basically correct.

I don’t want serifs in my chord symbols and don’t like the idea of doing a bunch of manual edits. The replies here remind that I am using NEW software! Not Finale, lol! In other words, it is constantly being improved. So since this need is on the radar of the devs, perhaps I’ll get what I want if I wait.

Meanwhile, what does the red triangle on chord component “maj” here mean:

red triangle
red triangle600×557 36.3 KB

And what is the reason for “preset text” here, under the Text tab of Edit Chord Symbol Component?

preset text
preset text800×512 45.4 KB

From where does this pull-down list populate and why not just type in what one wants in “enter text here”? Just trying to understand what’s going on under the hood here, and the rationale for this.

And Fred, yes I have seen you post about the the cut-off for which sharp is used being 76% for scaling for superscripts in the Chord Design area of engraving options, so I have kept that setting at 76%. But the issue, as you correctly diagnosed is that the sharp presented when one opens Edit Chord Symbol Component (ostensibly from the “standard accidental range” of the font set) is NOT the one actually used by default for things like my “#11”. Indeed, adding the composite of “comp.csymAccidentalSharp” did match perfectly.

My question, though – how were you able to determine what Dorico actually used? Surely not trial and error.

I suspect there is a composite for “#11” too, and if I could change that, that would obviate the need for all the individual edits, but I believe this gets into editing my “userlibrary.xml” file. Is that correct?

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I’m pretty sure that means there is an override to that specific component. You’re in the Engrave Mode chord symbol editor in your image, so any edits there are specific to that particular chord.

I’m not 100% sure about this, but I think it is populated from the CompositeDefinitions defined in the composites.xml file, plus any composites defined or changed in any doricolib files or in your userlibrary.xml. I seem to have a bunch of playing techniques and other stuff in my list too, so it’s more than just anything tagged with the kChordSymbols category.

It was a few years ago when I first discovered that, but it might have been, LOL! The SMuFL page for Standard Accidentals for Chord Symbols does list csymAccidentalSharp and csymAccidentalSharpSmall so I might have gone looking for those in the Composite dropdown, I honestly can’t remember. Daniel had answered some chord symbol questions when I first dug into these, so maybe he told me too.

There seems to be. In your composites.xml file, just search for smufl.glyph.alteration.prefix.sharp11. I think the catch is that Dorico is building this from the sharp composite and text.csac.11. As the 11 is text, and not a composite, I’m not sure we can edit that. I was unsuccessful when I tried a while back anyway.

I haven’t tried it, but I guess there’s no reason we have to leave that as text. It might be possible to define it as a composite and have the #11 composite use the newly defined 11 instead of text. I’ll play around with that tonight. Let me know if you can get it working!

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