what a mighty thread full of ideas, might I also add some I thought of lately:
dynamic foot-note creation would be amazing – being able to create an asterisk, cross or other symbol attached to any element of the score and to have a footnote text space with auto-spacing at the bottom of the same page… for critical editions, but also comments to any score (Mahler symphonies often have them to explain e.g. a transition to the conductor, but sometimes they need to be shown in (some or all) parts as well)
possible improvements to the playing techniques editor:
enable pinch to zoom / command-scroll to zoom in graphics editor
enable undo/redo in graphics editor
consider enabling cut/copy/paste shortcuts for selected symbols in graphics editor
scale glyphs in preview to the right so they fit completely into the preview boxes (already much better now than in earlier version, but could still be better (e.g. clefs, repeats, etc. some get cut off))
ability to snap movements to grid in graphics editor via key modifier
ability to scale items in graphics editor without preserving aspect ration (useful e.g. to change length of simple lines, rectangles, etc.)
ability to rotate elements
if possible, it would be amazing to be able to change the line thickness of all glyphs/vectors (like you can with modular fonts)
suggestions for additional accidentals visibility options:
option to hide cautionaries between staves, but only between the two staves of a grand staff instrument
remind from grace note, but not if the same note follows immediately, e.g. in a guitar chord (grace note acciacatura to normal)
option to not show cautionaries for different octaves, except when the octave follows immediately
possible typeface improvements
increase size of diamond noteheads
dont elongate ledger lines for strike-through noteheads, maybe consider drawing the strike through as primitive if possible, that way one could have a strike out version of any notehead
engraving option to allow tuplet numbers to go inside the staff
engraving option use flat slur curvature only for long slurs
option to show bar numbers also in staves that begin with a multi-bar-rest (when „show bar numbers for multi-bar rests“ is enabled) – because it is disruptive having to search for the bar number when normally every beginning of a stave shows one:
to have e.g. „tacet nr 3–27“ instead of separately for each flow (useful for pieces with many shorter numbers…)
it is nice to command-select multiple items in a score and then bulk-add e.g. dynamics to those different places – would be great if this also worked with playing techniques, ornaments, lines, and text (e.g. a custom created expression text style
to have an expression text style (italics) by default (e.g. shift-e), this is extremely common
option for fermatas to specify the duration in (exact or approx.) seconds or beats (or as a custom text)
a visual preview of the notehead types in the right click menu, or even a live-preview in the notation when hovering over… to quickly see how the many options look like
please make it possible for the hand-tool to also „grip“ on the background outside the music paper!
to not only have „poco a poco“ but any text (e.g. „molto“) inside hairpins…
Gradual dynamics truncated by immediate dynamics – why not instead create a continuous hairpin which encompasses the immediate dynamics? smoother than having to plan out via caret and popover… also make it possible to change the length of the second hairpin in an <p< case
ability to also show individual cues in layouts (not only the other way round, this is a lot of work in case you have mostly normal hidden cues but one or to which should be shown in the score (e.g. because it is a substitiution for an uncommon instrument in a different part))
to have tooltips for many more of the icons (top panel icons, right panel icons, icons in the lower panel (piano vs options etc))
condensing: placement of 1. 2. etc could be better, likes to create big gaps because of e.g. dynamics on that location of an entrance (almost always)…
better interpolation of glissando lines between systems (see example that happened to me):
enlarge size of niente circle
support typing “f” (including the “”) into dynamics popover to create dynamics inside quotation marks, widely used in (contemporary) music notation to signify the intensity of an action that will not actually result in the same dynamic level (e.g. key clicks)
would be nice to save which panel is open per view (engrave vs write etc) for example I often have all panels hidden in write mode but switch to engrave mode for things like hiding noteheads which are only available in the engrave mode bottom panel
Depending on what exactly you want, you may be able to scale these in Notehead Sets and save them as a default.
+1, a way to auto-select Flat over a certain length could be nice. Also, I’d really like flat slurs that are actually flat. Dorico’s are a weird combination of 2 curved slurs put together or something. In any case the center of a Dorico “flat slur” is actually thinner than the shoulders which makes them look really odd to me and different than virtually all published music.
Not my personal style, but I have a client who always asks for this too, so this would be a nice option to have.
This is easy to do already. Once you hit the Save as Default star in Paragraph Styles, that style will be available to select in Preferences/Key Commands. (I use Shift+E for this myself)
You can do this in Music Symbols/Dynamics/Niente (for hairpins). I agree the default is too small.
If you mean to show this on the score (as opposed to making it a Play option), I am not sure why one would not just notate the hold using regular notes; I thought the fermata pretty much left the length somewhat optional to performer/conductor interpretation.
This has been discussed before and it is a wonderful idea. It would be a boon for many of us.
If implemented, in addition to any layout options, I’d like to see the following three options, assignable on a case-by-case basis:
A footnote feature is one of those things that, once available, would change how I go about expressing the music. I find that with the lines feature, I use that quite often to indicate things more clearly than I did in the past. For example, in jazz charts, a string of 8th notes with marcato accents conventionally indicates that those notes are played straight (not swung), but not necessarily accented as heavily as a jazz marcato would indicate in isolation. This is often confusing and subject to different interpretations.
To avoid confusion, some arrangers explicitly write “Straight 8ths”, but then it may be ambiguous how long the player is to play straight. With the lines feature, it is very easy to give a straight 8th marking and bracket the notes explicitly, leaving no confusion. I think it is fundamentally better than the older conventions.
I can see footnotes being equally useful, changing the way we might approach parts in some cases. In addition to
Bottom of page
End of flow
End of layout
It should also include “Below current system” and “Below current staff”, particularly in parts. If we are giving performance instructions in the part, it may be better for the commentary to be immediately under the notes in question, rather than requiring the player to look to the bottom of the page. I realize I can accomplish that with regular text, however, I’d like to think a Footnotes feature might include the possibility of having a single comment with the option of specifying on which scores and parts the commentary should appear.
(And an option for above, for that matter.)
Imagine what Percy Grainger would have done if he had this feature.
In live-performances, a fermata can have a completely different feeling from a number of rests (or a held note) with the same duration (where the tempo continues). Yes the duration is normally quite free, but already between e.g. approx. 3sec, 6sec or 9sec, there is a very different effect, and for unknown music, this information might not be obvious.
On the different types (seconds vs beats vs custom): while „switching“ from feeling a tempo to counting seconds has the effect of lifting you more out of the previous situation, giving the time in beats can call for the conductor more to stay in the feeling of the tempo. In music theater scores you might use custom text of course to say e.g. „continue after X has left stage“, which can be difficult to manually align, maybe make the fermata bar wider, etc.
Of course it would be a great amalgamation if the beat/time duration would be understood by playback.
I’m afraid I didn’t find the place to place this – there’s nothing on my Mac named “DefaultLibraryAdditions”. Can anybody help me get this thing to work on my Mac?
It looks like that lives at ~/Users/[username]/LibraryApplication Support/Steinberg/Dorico #/DefaultLibraryAdditions on a Mac. If DefaultLibraryAdditions doesn’t already exist there, try creating it, then add the doricolib file in that location.
That’s the right place – thank you!
But: This puts a slash in front of every addition (as in Cm/add9, where it is obviously wrong). On the other hand I still cannot have a chord symbol with two slashes (like Gm7/9/11).
How can I remove it again? Taking the file out of the folder and restart Dorico 4 doesn’t work.
All that file did was redefine the opening parenthesis to be a slash and the closing one to be nothing. I’ve never seen your chord nomenclature before, so thought it might save you some time, but if you need normal parentheses and multiple slashes then it won’t work and you’ll have to create all the chords manually in Project Default Appearances. Just delete the file. If you just started a New file with that active then perhaps those settings were embedded in it, but once deleted it shouldn’t affect anything else, or any other New files.
It may be possible to get what you want with a doricolib file rather than manually creating all suffixes for all roots, but you’d likely have to be pretty experienced with editing them to have a shot at it.
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this here already, but sometimes a broken tie (commonly found in french notation) can solve collision issues. I’ve had to do this manually in some of my keyboard music. I think it would be nice to have the option in properties.
Yes, I understood that before. And by trying it out I realized that it wouldn’t solve my problem, because when you use parenthesis you write Cm(add9), and it makes no sense to replace that with Cm/add9. Also if you use parenthesis you write Cm7(9,11) or Cm7(9 11), but that ends up in Cm7/9,11 or Cm7/9 11 – and both are not useful, because a divider like a slash should divide all additions from each other, but not an addition from the root.
Thank you again for trying to help me out! I’m still looking forward to a real re-work of the chord symbol section …
Yeah, I’d love to have a way to create a custom suffix, or modify an existing one, and have it apply to all roots, instead of spending hours creating suffixes for each root. I’ve figured a few tricks such as accidental placement, dim symbol placement, etc, that can be done globally with a doricolib file, but there’s still a lot that I’d like to be able to globally edit too.
I imagine that feature, if implemented flexibly, could solve my desire for adding sections of dialogue when e.g. scoring an operetta. (I would probably put them between flows, but occasionally the “top/bottom of system” would be useful for smaller snippets).
one that came to me after seeing a post on the Facebook group:
It would be nice if one could make lines that simply attach from notehead to notehead.
Meaning that you don’t put in a horizontal line, then need to go into engraver mode to make it diagonal.
It would also be nice to define the end-points and attachment points of lines so that they don’t appear either too short or too long, but always the exact right distance from a note/accidental.
Jesper is right. And before lines were implemented, you could already use the gliss tool without text… So it’s been possible natively for quite some years!
