I’m working on a song that has a country-music-style recitation - a long passage that is spoken rather than sung. Think Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue”. I still want to show the singer approximately where the phrases fall against the rythmic structure and chord pattern, so I’d like the have the recitation under the staff where the lyrics go. Any ideas about how to make this work? I’m still using Dorico 4 SE, though I could easily move to Dorico 5 SE. I’m just being lazy about making that move.
You can write lengthy phrases of lyrics under one note using a hard space: Shift Alt Space.
Or you may do just as well to use a Text Object, if you want multiple lines stacked on top of each other.
There’s certainly plenty of reasons to upgrade to v5.
The last time I did this I used the idea of attaching phrases to particular notes. It worked sort of OK, but it really became a pain when I then revised the melody. In the SE4 manual, I don’t find any references to “text objects” anywhere, but in the index I do find “system-attached text”. Is that what you meant? As I review the information at p. 992-993 of the SE4 manual, I’m wondering if I"m going to be able to put system-attached text where I want it, i.e. where the lyrics would go.
I’m also thinking I’d like to have some sort of at least rhythmic notation in the staff to give the performer an idea of how to phrase the recitation. How might that be done?
Dorico has two different kinds of Text: Staff-attached Text, which … attaches to a given staff; and system-attached text, which attaches to the system as a whole (e.g. in the same way that a Tempo mark, rehearsal Mark etc only appears on the top staff.)
On further experimentation, I’ve figured out that one way to do this that avoids some of the reformatting issues that happen when you change the melody is to take the section that is recitation, figure out how many measures the recitation will occupy, and put in enough eighth notes to accomodate the approximate number of syllables per measure. Then go through and enter the lyrics as you usually would, more or less on syllable per note. Then change all the noteheads to slashes. I fiddled wiith it so that I made rests appear at the spots where the speaker would naturally pause, bu I didn’t try to fully specify the spoken rhythm, since different performers will inevitably do their own thing with it anyway. I tried to hit a happy medium between indicating where the recitation is supposed to fit without trying to over-specify how it should be performed. I’m pretty happy with the result. It’s readable and interpretable without messing up the sung portions of the song. Of course, it’s all visual; it’s pretty unbearable on playback, so I don’t play it back!
I imagine you know one can suppress playback of notes so your would not hear the instrument assigned to your recitation.