Custom clefs?

I am working on an experiment involving an aternate notation system, and would like to know whether Dorico can handle custom clefs and the pitch mapping to staves involved. Thanks and looking forward to D-Day!

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Dorico doesn’t yet have a custom clef editor, but it would certainly be possible for us to add one in the future.

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I, a geek, thank you, sir!

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This is a deal breaker for me. Actually, the general lack of customization in Dorico is really the deal breaker.

It takes time to add customisation features, as perhaps you can appreciate. There is very deep customisation possible for e.g. accidentals, chord symbols, percussion cues, and so on. In Dorico Pro 2 we have added the means to customise playing techniques and we will shortly be added a means to edit existing and define your own notehead types, too. Not to mention the literally hundreds of engraving and notation options to affect the appearance of every item in the score. So perhaps you could be more specific about the nature of the clef customisation you need, and indeed what customisation you find you are lacking in general. I’m sure you can see that there is no philosophical objection to customisation, given the many examples of possibilities for customisation I have outlined in this post, so you probably just need to be a little more patient until we have time to work on these areas.

Patience. They’re on version 2 after all.

Remember, it took Finale well over a decade to come up with a usable chord input paradigm. Dorico’s only been out for 19 months and has already leapfrogged the other players on more than one front including chords. Clef customization will be around soon enough I’m sure. These guys aren’t stupid.

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Any news on this? I would love to have this feature as well.

There’s no dedicated clef designer, but if one of the existing clefs has the right musical properties but the wrong appearance, you can use Engrave > Music Symbols to change the visual appearance of that clef.

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There’s no dedicated clef designer, but if one of the existing clefs has the right musical properties but the wrong appearance, you can use Engrave > Music Symbols to change the visual appearance of that clef.

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While we’re on this topic, I’d like to build on tonywardarts’ suggestion if I may. I would to be able to design custom staff proportions, meaning that I would like to have staves in which the 5 lines are not equidistant.

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Thanks, Daniel. It worked for me. I like using double G clefs or double F clefs instead of the regular octave clefs for piano. That could be done easily in the Music Symbols editor.

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Thanks very much for this, Daniel; I too used this successfully to create some fun, weird clefs.

It would be wonderful if the feature “New from Selection” popped up in the “Music Symbols…” editor, at the very least for clefs. This is incredibly useful in the notehead editor, and I suspect I would get a lot of mileage out of this feature should it crop up in a new Dorico version.

That’s not really how the Music Symbols editor works, David: you can’t create new music symbols in there because the set of symbols shown in that dialog is the set of symbols that Dorico knows the meaning of.