Apologies for the long post, but I just finished a couple of jobs and some of these issues were fresh in my mind. Some of these wishes have been popping up on the forum recently too, so I just thought I’d jot them all down in one place. Anyway, sorry for the stream-of-consciousness ordering and some of the repeat requests, but here are a pile of things I’d love to see in Dorico 5. Thanks for considering!
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Per instrument/player cue control. In Drum parts for example, often the rhythmic cue essentially is the actual part, so that cue needs to be visible in both the score and the drum part. A conductor needs to know exactly what the drummer has in their part, in order to correctly yell at them for missing the hits. The ability to turn on cue visibility in the score for that staff and that staff alone would be very useful. As of now these figures all need to be manually entered in order to appear in the score. Another approach could maybe be to select an individual cue and have a visibility override in Properties.
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Text cues. Some sort of text cue capability would be great. As of now it’s not terribly difficult to switch to Local and hide text items in the score, but some way to automate text cues would certainly be helpful. Or perhaps a Paragraph Style setting to allow a certain style to only show in part layouts or only show in score layouts could work. Setting a shortcut to input text that would only show in part layouts would allow the user to skip the switch to local and hide step.
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“Tie ends” for repeat endings. In Finale, it’s one click to assign a tie end to a note at the beginning of a repeat ending. Dragging LV ties around is time consuming and feels kludgy, especially if there are a lot of them to do. Even if playback of these ties isn’t implemented at this time, having the visual tie for the performer positioned correctly and quickly would be a time saver.
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Alternate chord changes. The parenthesis feature is great for alternate chord changes, but 2 sets of changes still cannot occupy the same beat. As soon as I use a different beat for the alternate change, it affects the spacing so this is obviously less than ideal. If 2 changes still can’t occupy the same beat, at least a way to specify that a chord symbol should not be considered by the spacing algorithm would be useful. Perhaps ideally this could work like multiple sets of lyrics and the user can just arrow up or down to another row of chords.
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“Late” instrument changes. Having instrument changes at the bar of entrance, not at the end of the previous instrument, is the standard in jazz and Broadway fields at least, and the added key sig (if needed) is often a reminder to the player that something is different in case they were reading ahead and spaced out on the “to” indication. The Dorico/Gould way of “early” changes is just wrong in these genres. The workaround with independent key sigs is a pain.
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Ability to hide cautionary key sigs. I know this is beating a dead horse, but this is the standard style for modulating etudes. If a pattern is repeating through the keys then there’s no need for cautionary key sigs or accidentals, and I often use this style when notating exercises for students. See Hanon (Schirmer edition) pages 50-61, 65-68, 87-94, and 98-105 for examples of this, but there are countless other examples in other etude books. Perhaps this could even be included as a Notation Option so it could be flow-specific, but a Properties checkbox would be fine too.
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Signpost for incomplete bars. It’s very easy to change a time signature and end up with a bar with the incorrect number of beats. As a proofreading tool, a way to show a signpost highlighting any bars that contain a different number of beats than what the time signature indicates would be very useful.
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Ignore for vertical spacing. Having multiple items at the same beat, like rehearsal marks, tempos, text, etc., often creates way more vertical space between systems than is actually required once I’ve manually positioned the items. To be able to click the rehearsal mark once I’ve manually positioned it and check an “Ignore for vertical spacing” checkbox would quickly fix many spacing issues, and would be much faster than manually moving staves around.
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“Smart” instrument headers. I assume this is probably quite difficult to automate, but doublers are accustomed to the header at the top listing the instrument that is being played in the first bar of the page. Something like “Reed 1 (Flute)” at the top allows the player to know what instrument is being played on that page during a rehearsal, so they don’t have to go back to the very beginning and read through the entire arrangement to find any instrument changes. Only having “Reed 1” at the top is useful for the librarian, but not the performer. As of now I have to do all of these with page overrides.
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Cut time. A Notation Option to beam/group 2/2 exactly the same as 4/4. I personally don’t beam cut time any differently and it’s annoying to always have to fix the first bar manually and then hide a 4/4.
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Notation Options / Force Duration. There are quite a few areas where Notation Options are insufficient and Force Duration must be used. This link isn’t comprehensive, but I quickly documented quite a few of my personal pet peeves in this thread. I’m sure others have additional situations they would like addressed too.
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Chord symbol suffix alteration baseline. When using 76% to invoke the larger, more legible suffix alteration glyphs, the accidental is poorly aligned with the number in literally every font other than Academico. (Test it with Times, Minion, Helvetica, etc. to see what I mean.) Unfortunately there isn’t a way to globally modify and position a suffix, so it must repeatedly be edited for every single root. In my own default file I don’t have any double sharp or double flat roots, but I’ve edited each of my chord suffixes for 21 roots. This is a major PITA and I now have hundreds of chord overrides. Either a way to specify a suffix alteration baseline, or a way to make a global change to a suffix that will be reflected in all roots really is required here. A global level of custom editing could affect suffixes for all roots, and then a more specific level could be used for editing suffixes for specific roots. (Additionally, there is a known bug where modifications to single suffixes get wiped out when you make a modification to a double suffix too, which would be great to see fixed.)
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Custom chord symbol library. It’s simply not reasonable to expect Dorico to account for every possible chord symbol nomenclature system from every different composer. Certainly modern jazz composers, non-Western composers, etc., will have lots of different requirements, some original to the composer. Repurposing an existing chord that’s not being used in the project is a very kludgy workaround. Some sort of mechanism to manually add a unique or uncommon chord symbol is needed.
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Shift-select chord symbols. It would be very useful to be able to Shift-select chord symbols in the same way you can notes. Select the first, hold down Shift, then select the last to get all the chords in that region. Or select the first, Ctrl-select the last, and Ctrl-Shift-A to get everything in between. The double command shortcuts to filter chords are certainly helpful (I use Ctrl-F, Q) but it would be nice if this could just work in the same way it does for notes.
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Part-specific Tempo line breaks. Long tempo indications can wreak havoc in the parts as there may be only certain positions in the system that can accommodate the full text. The ability to select a longer Tempo indication and independently split it into two (or more) lines of text for a specific part would solve this issue.
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Mixer default state. I generally do all my Dorico mixing, reverb, etc in VEPro. As I don’t really use Dorico’s mixer, I’d really like the default state to be all levels at 0 and no plug-ins added, so I don’t have to go in and fix this in every project. It would be great to have a Preferences or Playback Option setting for this.
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Bar repeats - score vs. parts. Often repeated figures are fully written out in a score, but bar repeats used in the parts. This way the conductor can always tell what the figure is even if the initial statement was on a prior page, and the performer’s part is still optimal for reading. It would be great if there was some sort of local mechanism to control whether the bar repeats or the actual music should be shown.
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MIDI-off. It would be very useful if Dorico could keep track of MIDI-off events when inputting. This way the user could roll a chord by either physically depressing the keys or using the sustain pedal to input awkward chords or chords that extend beyond a reachable range. This would be very useful for example when the input caret is extended through a trombone section or for doing score reductions. For pitch-first users, if a note isn’t being held it would be great if entering a duration with no note being played could advance the cursor by the value entered rather than entering the previously played note or chord. @dan_kreider mentions this here.
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Create Blank region. I almost effectively have this now. I edited my Small Slash Notehead Set to just be a non-breaking space as I don’t really need small slashes. If I need a Blank region with all notes and rests hidden, I just apply a Slash region and then click the small slashes property, which effectively hides all notes and rests, but they still play back correctly. This works pretty well, except the horizontal spacing now reflects the slash region instead of the underlying music. If I’m creating a worksheet for a student to fill in or to transcribe a dictation, it would be great to be able to apply a Blank region to hide the notes and rests, but still correctly maintain the horizontal spacing of the underlying music. A checkbox to not maintain the underlying spacing would probably be useful too if something like a Blank region is implemented.
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Right panel states. It would be great if Dorico could remember last used right panel states, especially for Playing Techniques. Also, it doesn’t make any sense to have Slash, Bar Repeat, and Numbered Bar Regions buried in drop-downs when they are the only things in there. The drop-downs could either always be open as they only contain one item, or simply done away with altogether as they are currently unnecessary. (Perhaps other items are planned to be included in the drop-downs in the future.)
