I am a classical guitarist, and new to Dorico, so forgive me if I don’t see the ‘obvious’… Given that all my ‘notation’ needs are for arrangements and basic composition, I decided to purchase Dorico Elements instead of the Pro version.
I am currently facing 2 ‘basic’ problems/conflicts to move forward with some of my projects:
How can I properly add left and right-hand fingering at the same time for one single note? It looks that often one overwrites the other (even with moving one or the other out of the way in ‘engrave’ mode)
How can I create ‘barre’-notations? (Roman numerals with a horizontal line until the note where one needs to hold the barre) I know that some of my colleagues are using ‘customized playing techniques’ but that option isn’t available on ‘Dorico elements’. Is there a workaround for this?
For fretted and plucked instruments like the classical guitar, the fingerings popover has Special Behaviour: you can input left and right fingerings for the same note, according to the icon shown in the popover (L for left fingering, R for right).
(Be slightly careful about “just moving things out of the way in Engrave mode”, as Dorico has an underlying semantic understanding of where things are “supposed” to be, which like in this case, can have additional benefits.)
To get the barre notation, yes to have full flexibility over the symbol you do need Dorico Pro, but you can achieve something perfectly reasonable in Elements. Dorico ships with “C” and “1/2C” playing techniques, which automatically show a line and hook when they’ve got duration. You can use the Properties panel to add a suffix of whatever text you want to these, e.g. “II”.
You can also use a generic horizontal line and show text at its start, but hopefully the barre playing technique with suffix method is fine already, as lines are intended for different use-cases than playing techniques and so show a bit of line to the left of text (because for something to be truly at the beginning of a line, it needs to be its start cap, and full editing of line caps is only possible in Dorico Pro).
Thank you so much, Lillie! For some reason, I struggled finding ‘what’ exactly I needed to type in. The ‘panel’ wasn’t showing on the right. Being an absolute beginner I didn’t realize I had to press the ‘painter’s palette’ first on top of the right before seeing all those options that are listed per instrument (it was set to the 'keyboard-button underneath it). Something as simple as that made things a whole lot easier
You’re welcome! If you’re new to Dorico, you might benefit from working through our First Steps guide which is a step-by-step tutorial for creating a short piano piece with explanations about how Dorico works along the way.
It’s popover-focussed, but there are pointers to how to access the panels as well too.
