Duplicate Chord Symbol Override

Dorico
1

Hi again,

Let say I changed the appearance of a chord symbol in the Engrave mode, then I override that chord in Library > Chord Symbols… I think it would be just simple to duplicate the override in order to make another chord with the same appearance and symbols positions. @FredGUnn what do you think?

2

Sorry, I don’t think I’m quite following you here. Let’s say I have a C7sus chord and I manually edit that in Engrave to be C74 which Dorico doesn’t support.
C74

So in the editor below, you want to somehow modify that override then duplicate it?

edit
edit961×855 40.9 KB

I don’t think there are any tools in that editor to do that, are there? Or am I not understanding what your suggesting?

3

@FredGUnn Sorry for not being clear. It’s just simple, I mean when you create that single override C7sus4, the way where you put the 7th on the top and the 4th on the bottom for example, why not just have an option like “Duplicate Single Override” this will serves to make the same stacked 7th and 4th for another chord root such E7sus4 or whatever root you want, instead of repeating the tedious process of adjustments for every chord quality. @dspreadbury Thanks for thinking about this with your Steinberg team.

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4

Oh, it’s a feature request, got it! Yeah, there really does need to be an easier way to create a suffix edit and have it apply to all roots. There needs to be a way to create custom suffix qualities that aren’t currently supported as well. I’m sure the team is aware of these deficiencies, but there certainly will continue to be a lot of traffic with these requests as it was so easy to globally create any sort of suffix you wanted in Finale. (Well, easy as in possible, the editor was fairly terrible.) I expect ex-Finale users will continue to complain for a while. I had basically stopped with my own chord symbol requests as I had mostly figured out how to do the things I was wishing for with doricolib files, but most people aren’t going to dive in that deep. Here are a few things I fixed on my own:

  1. 69 chords. It’s not a fraction, the slash doesn’t need to be there. Just stack the 6 directly over the 9.
  2. Sharp and flat alterations should not share a physical baseline with the number in the suffix. It looks unbalanced. Advanced options under Position can correct for these with the root but not the suffix.
  3. Dorico currently only uses abbreviated modal names. As some of these aren’t as commonly seen I like the option to use the full names as well. I just redefined them so when “append period” is selected I get the abbreviated name, and when “do not append period” is selected I actually get the full name.
  4. I created a functioning Chord Symbol Slash Font font style. Since there are no kerning controls with slashes, reducing the font size of the slash improves the spacing. I also have some positioning controls in there that aren’t available through the interface.

All those things should really be added too. I just had shut up about them as I hacked them in myself. I’d love to be able to change the undocumented 75/76% split point between the small and standard variants of suffix accidentals too. I had tried at one point to redefine the small variants to actually use the standard glyphs if that split point is hardwired in, but I couldn’t get those to work.

I do have one client that uses that 74 notation. I’ve seen a lot of unusual nomenclature requests on here since Finale folded too. At a certain point, there’s just no way to account for every single nomenclature system out there, so there needs to be some way to add custom global suffixes. Plus a way to add alternate chords, and use roman numeral roots, and …

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That’s a huge work @FredGUnn :smiley: wow! I understand.

At some point, that’s why I’ve created my own chord font (the one that mimic a bit HL RealB). I use the font via Text tool: Shift+X, and when I need to transpose, I only switch the font since I’ve made 12 of the same basic chord font where I only changed the order of the roots in each ;-)…Tricky!

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