When exporting audio, it would be helpful to have the ability to select a region of measures to export.
For God’s sake PLEASE fix the barbershop quartet template. It is wrong! Barbershop harmony does not use four staves, it uses two. Yes, it’s easy to remove unneeded staves in Setup Mode, but why not just get it right to begin with? Additionally, there should be two templates because men’s and women’s barbershop use different clefs. For men, octave down treble clef and regular bass; for women, regular treble and octave up bass. I know that the octave up bass clef is reserved for Pro, but PLEASE put it in the template so that a correct women’s template is available to users of SE and Elements. Yes, I know - barbershop harmony is not your most important constituency, but I’d like to think that as a software developer you want more users rather than fewer. There are a lot of people who sing barbershop and a lot of people who arrange barbershop, and they won’t try Dorico if they perceive it as not barbershop friendly. I know of barbershoppers who downloaded Dorico, took one look at the barbershop template, decided that Dorico doesn’t work for barbershop, and got rid of the program. Dorico is awesome and those people don’t know what they’re missing. Please, please, correct the barbershop template. I’ve developed Dorico templates for barbershop based on guidelines from the Barbershop Harmony Society and I’m happy to share them. They are attached. Feel free to use them. They are in the latest version of Pro.
Greetings,
I am also an arranger in the Sweet Adeline International organization. I agree with all of Carole’s comments and request swift feature support for barbershop needs.
I was evaluating Dorico as a replacement for Finale and have to halt my investigation because this fundamental feature for barbershop music is not supported.
Please implement support for two instruments per staff. Otherwise, a large number of music arrangers will not be able to use your software … which seems quite nice in all other respects.
Hi Tamra, and welcome to the forum. “Not supported” is incorrect. Dorico certainly can copy barbershop music correctly. If you read Carole’s post carefully, she is just pointing out that the template currently provided with Dorico is set up wrong, and she attached her own good templates for this purpose. As she said, feel free to use them, and I hope you will enjoy using Dorico.
Thank you for the swift reply. I tried other forms of Support noted on the Dorico website ( Chat & Phone ) but was unable to reach anyone. This was quite surprising for the Chat service.
I attempted to learn the template modifications that Carole provided, but was unable to find any tutorial or guidance in the online help. Can you please point me to the proper information?
In the meantime, I’m very relieved to see Carole’s template posting and will continue orient myself to the software using her template.
Actually I did modify the template provided - removing extra staves, putting in the correct clefs, paragraph styles and layout options to match the guidelines from the Barbershop Harmony Society.
I am a volunteer copyist for BHS/SAI. I have worked on hundreds of charts for the Society. I even teach classes in Finale for barbershoppers at Harmony College NW.
I’m currently evaluating the options for going forward, since the end of Finale. For us older folk, staying with Finale is the best option. For the younger crew, I think Dorico will win, if I can get a couple of issues settled. I’ve been told that it’s also being discussed at HQ. Creating a two-staff template in Dorico is easy, but as I said, there are a couple of missing aspects.
Society copyists have been using my Finale BBS templates for a number of years. I’ll be happy to open a conversation with any of you!
What are the missing aspects? I’ve yet to find anything needed for barbershop that Dorico can’t handle. The only problem I’ve ever encountered is that the women’s bass clef (transposing) is found only in Pro, which doesn’t help for arrangers who have Elements or SE. It’s one of many reasons I created templates – so that anyone who needs an SSAA template can have one with the correct clefs.
As for going forward, I was a Finale user for more than 20 years. I had already switched to Dorico a couple of years ago and had started converting my files. When the announcement came, I put a lot of time into transferring all of my arrangements into Dorico – that is now done, and I don’t need to worry about keeping an old computer running just to have Finale. Granted, there are lots of folks with far more Finale files than I had, but all of my arranging files are now in Dorico. I still have Finale but no longer use it. When Windows 10 hits end of life I’ll replace my computer and Finale will go away for good.
What’s missing? Primarily, a way to keep the section titles available: Intro, Verse, Chorus, etc. I know they can be entered as Staff text, but that requires typing them in every time. In Finale, I have them in my Rehearsal Marks Expressions category. A couple of other miscellaneous expressions. No way to easily enter a Swing heading (mentioned in another thread.) A couple of other little things.
Granted, many of my problems are due to me being a beginner. I’m certainly open to being shown the Dorico way. Would your offer to help Tamra be open to me, as well?
I have a Paragraph Style called “Section Text” for things like Intro, Verse, Chorus, Tag, etc. Shift-X, then type the text that’s needed, then apply the Paragraph Style.
