Dorico for pop/rock/etc bands?

[antoinevankampen]

I am still experimenting.

I created a few bars and added the repeat barlines.

This slightly shifts the bar lines. Is it possible to re-align the bar lines again?

Antoine

[FredGUnn]

@ahcvankampen

Still, rather cumbersome to input the chords, but again that might be my inexperience with Dorico.

Are you just using Shift-Q and typing them in? That seems pretty simple to me. I’m not actually sure how they could make it any easier. With a symbol selected you can Alt-click to copy it to other measures too.

[antoinevankampen]

Yep, it’s more easy then I thought using shortcuts and keyboard (tab, space, arrows).

[Stefaan]

@ahcvankampen

I created a few bars and added the repeat barlines.
shift.jpg

Hi Antoine, I noticed in your example that there’s no barline at the beginning of the staff. You can create it as follows: Notation Options > Barlines > Systemic Barline: Show for one or more staves.

Best regards,

Stefaan

[antoinevankampen]

Thanks, but doesn’t solve the alignment of the bar lines.

[Stefaan]

@ahcvankampen

Thanks, but doesn’t solve the alignment of the bar lines.

Are you asking how to align the barlines of the three systems? I think that would only be possible by moving them manually. But that would never be my choice, since in my opinion it’s natural that the length of the staff minus the width of the repeat barline is divided by eight.

[antoinevankampen]

I indeed want to have a fixed number of bars for each staff (4 or 8). But it would be nice if the barlines of the different systems would be aligned. And to have a fixed width for each bar. The width of each bar now depends on the amount of stuff you put in there.

Given all the input above, I have now something that might work for me but is still not ideal:

-An example of how I would like to combine chord structure with notes at only some places.

• I have put quarter rests to allow the placement of chords at that resolution
• I manually colored the rests (light gray). Although straightforward, it seems not to be possible to select all rests (with Select more) since some of these rests are ‘non existing’ but generated by Dorico (as I understood from another post). Thus it requires some effort to color all rests.
• I Can move the chords further downwards and set the thickness of the staff lines to 1/1000 but this also makes the staff lines from the second system (with the notes) invisible. Moreover, since the chord symbols and rests would then be overlapping and the rests will be on top, it would not be possible to read the chords anymore.
  -The ‘Chorus’ text is not aligned with the ‘Verse 2’ text above due to the brackets of the piano staves. Probably can be fixed but didn’t look at it.
  -I still can’t get the first bar starting with a barline despite some suggestions given above.
  -Why is there a 4/4 at the end of staff 6?
  -Finally, more me the current layout is still to spacey. I know that also this can be further changed but didn’t have the time yet to try this.

I will probably do some more work on this but all further thoughts and suggestions are welcome.
Antoine
ps. i wanted to attach the dorico file but for some reason only images are allowed?

[dspreadbury]

If you want to attach a Dorico project, you must first zip it up into an archive, and then attach it. The archive itself must be 2MB in size or smaller.

[antoinevankampen]

Thanks. For who is interested:
WaitingInLine.dorico_v2.zip (448 KB)

[cparmerlee]

@rafaelv

It’s a workaround. In the engraving options for barlines choose to show repeat dots only when the start repeat is at the start of the system. Create a playing technique with the needed Barline and move it in engrave mode.

The more I look at your example, Rafael, the more I really, really like this whole idea.

As I said above, there are lots of bands I work with that use the “Microsoft Word” notation system. 100% of them could easily adapt to your example and it has many benefits:

1. The chord symbology is better than anybody does in Word
2. The spacing is easier to read, and can easily be done with 4 or 8 bars per line
3. Measure numbers, rehearsal marks and system text will automatically match the other parts that use conventional notation
4. Repeats, endings, codas etc will display. This may be a little foreign to the people who use Word notation, but those are not difficult concepts. This could be a stepping stone for those musicians to become more comfortable with conventional notation.
5. We should be able to get the lyrics to appear, although that may be tricky if there is no melody line to which the lyrics can attach.
6. There might be the option to add 5-line staves as needed in order to show particular riffs or cues. I’m not sure this would be easy to do with Dorico. But I’d like to think we could at least attach rhythmic cues to the no-staff line.

I could really see this being a popular feature.

[antoinevankampen]

Yes, I totally agree. The Word notation is easy but doing it in Dorico potentially opens so much additional opportunities. A lot already being possible with some effort. But I hope in the future Dorico will find the time to put some further thoughts into this. It’s probably not a priority but additional functionally to facilitate these type of layouts may be found useful by many (new) users.
Antoine

[MaxRBb]

Hello,

just a tip, unfortunately only on IOs(Ipad), but definetely worth checking out. The app is called “1chart”, it does nashville number system or letters as chord roots, transposes on the spot and has some nice options for rhytmic notation…just half way in between handwriting or Letters and slashes and a serious notation prog like Dorico. Cheers R