Hello!
In Finale, I had my own custom Chord Suffix Library and specific font settings for Chord Symbol roots.
I tried watching some videos and reading the manual but it hasn’t helped as I seem to have created a mess!
Is there anyone out there who has done this successfully?
Thanks in advance for any help!
It would be most helpful to have some specific examples of what you want to achieve, for starters. That will help determine the method to get there.
Dorico’s approach to chord symbols is quite different from Finale’s (and indeed from any other program’s). Although you can build up your own library of chord symbol appearances, you can’t currently do so in such a way that you can set up a set of suffixes that can appear on any root – though that has of course been requested and is something we are considering for future versions.
So as Dan says, it’s helpful to know what kind of appearance you’re shooting for, and then we’ll be able to direct you how to get there. A picture or two would go a long way.
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Daniel, can you say if customization of chord symbols will appear in Dorico 6?
To me and I think a lot of people this is really an important thing. This is the barrier that prevents me to using Dorico every day (and it kept me using Finale).
I have proposed this feature (or enhancement) many times in the past here in the forum.
If you have been on the forum for a while, you probably know that Daniel does not announce features in advance until they are ready (and release is really imminent, if then).
Still, I suppose it doesn’t hurt to ask. (Good luck.)
May be you can give a PDF with examples of your Finale chord symbols. So we can sea and explain you the best way how to achieve that in Dorico.
In general the first step is to go to engraving options (Ctrl shift e) and than explore the settings for chord symbols.
Chord symbols are already pretty customizable in Dorico 5! There are hundreds of options on the Chord Symbols page of Engraving Options, you can specify a default appearance for a particular chord symbol, and you can override the graphical appearance of an individual chord symbol by editing it in Engrave mode.
I assume that what you are referring to is the ability to edit the whole “suffix”, i.e. everything that follows the root note. If so, allow me to repeat what I wrote in my previous reply: this is something we are considering for future versions.
As I said on Facebook the other day, it’s a running joke within our team that since we started working on chord symbols around the time of Dorico 1.0’s release in October 2016, at least one member of the team has been working on chord symbols practically every day since then. It must by now be the single area of the program that has had the greatest time investment over the past eight years. Right now, in fact, two members of the team are working on chord symbols features. So we can at least say that the next major version of Dorico will definitely include some new capabilities for chord symbols, but I’m not willing to share further details at this stage, as the next major version is still a long way off.
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Daniel, thank you for the explanation. Yes, Dorico has already many customizations for chord symbols. The only thing missing is an ease way to edit whole suffixes.
In the classic genre, chord symbols are not important, but in many other they really are. In Finale this edit was very easy - but in Dorico the way it is now is complicated (needs a lot of work to do the edit in all the roots). I really hope that you can bring it in version 6).
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Another Finale crossgrader here with custom chord symbols. I can customize the chord symbol appearances (excellent editor) and save them as default. So far so good. Only issue is of course it seems I have to do this for every root. Will do it bit by bit or hope for an update to address this.
Welcome to the forum, @Stefan_VdB. Yes, for the time being, you have to set the chord symbol appearance for every root separately. We know users would like to be able to do this universally and have the appearance of everything following the root applied to any root, and this is something we plan to implement in future.
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Hello, I defined the chord symbols in the Engraver Options Chord Symbols dialog which seems to cover my needs (amazing flexibility!). I also changed the Chord Symbols Font in the Engraver Library Font Styles to a slightly larger font. Only part of the chord I don’t seem to be able to change the size for is the chord alteration b9 as in E7b9. Would like that a bit bigger without having to resort to Chord Symbol Overrides. What is this part called in Font Styles or where can I set this?
Check the scale factor in Engraving Options:
If it’s just the accidental you want larger, check Font Styles / Chord Symbols Music Text Font.
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Great, got it, thank you for the fast reply.
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Is there any progress being made toward being able to create custom chord suffix symbols?
Ive had to stop learning Dorico and go back to Finale full-bore because of my workload. I simply don’t have the time to learn a new app that doesn’t have the same capabilities yet. Also, I’m hoping that the “left double barline” issue is also being addressed.
Keeping my fingers crossed…
There’s been one maintenance release since this thread was started and it didn’t contain any chord symbol updates. The devs rarely ever mention future features in advance. On August 28th, Daniel said D6 was not imminent and was “nowhere near finished” so I wouldn’t get your hopes up for any changes to this coming soon.
D5 was released at the end of May 2023. That seems like a good time of year for software releases as any schools that have any budget left from the current fiscal year can spend it then, or wait until July 1 and spend it with the next year’s budget. Obviously some of the team must have been busy recently working on the Cubase 14 notation features too. If I had to guess, I would think May 2025 would be the earliest we’d see any change to chord symbol features.
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