Finale to Dorico questions

Hi all.
I just bought Dorico. Since I was a Finale user for many years, the first approach with Dorico was terrible.
I was not able to produce the same score as I did in Finale in few minutes.
This was scaring.
I do have some simple questions:

  1. How to add custom Section Markers within a Box such as Verse, Chorus, Coda and so on. It was so easy in Finale to add my personal Section Markers within the default document and have them available all the time.
  2. Is there any possibility to have the shortcuts of Dorico most similar to those of Finale?
  3. In Finale is was so easy to remove the staff name except the first one. In Dorico I was not able to find any way to do it.
  4. How to add to measure the Chord name?
    See attached example.

For the time being this is all.
Many thanks in advance for any kind answer.
Best regards
Peval

#3 Layout Options > Staves and Systems

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Thanks a lot.
Point 3 Solved.

Use system text (shift-alt/opt-X) and set the border property (in the lower properties panel).

You can set custom shortcuts for many, many, many actions (Preferences>Key Commands). Personally I would advise against trying to mimic Finale as there is a logic behind many of the Dorico defaults.

shift-Q adds chord (Quord!) symbols.

If you haven’t already, would strongly advise that you take the time to work through the First Steps exercises

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By assigning the same shortcuts, you may think that the functions work in the same way, which in a lot of case, they don’t.

I know it’s tough, but it’s really important to learn Dorico from the ground up. Remember that you probably didn’t take just a few minutes when you started in Finale. I know I didn’t!

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Hi @paolobetti, I reproduced your example in a couple of minutes (once you learn the workflow, it is very elegant and fast). I think overall the Dorico result is more consistent (Spacings, Chord Symbols text and positioning) due to the global settings. Here a comparison and the Dorico file:

Dorico File:
chord symbols, sections, repeats.dorico (536.1 KB)

Edit: if you want the main letter of Chord symbols to be bold (as in your example), is also doable:

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Thanks a lot for the answers and for the example project.
I was not able to access: Use system text (shift-opt-X). But I will study more.
I understood I have to invest more time to be comfortable with Dorico.
When long ago I started with Finale, in about a week I started to be very productive.
The projects I do are 90% Bass Guitar Scores.

One very convenient feature of Finale is the Rehearsal Marks. See below.

I don’t see nothing like that in Dorico.
It will be time consuming to write the text all the time instead of just pick to and assign what is needed.

In the example you have sent, I see maj7 chords written with the Delta symbol.
On my Dorico pro it remains as maj7.

Another feature I was not able to find is the setting of staves per page.

In any case, thanks a lot for your kind help.
Best regards
Peval.

We’re going to need you to try just a little bit here. This isn’t Finale so don’t assume it works the same way. Go to the online Help, type in rehearsal marks, click Enter, and you’ll get links to all the rehearsal marks settings, including how to input them:

If you haven’t found the online Help yet, here 'tis:
https://www.steinberg.help/r/dorico-pro/5.1/en

If you type in input rehearsal marks, literally the first response will have your answer.

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I think @paolobetti 's point was that in Finale it was easy to use rehearsal marks as arbitrary section markers (Intro, Coda, etc.), and you could save specific rehearsal mark text in your template to reuse it.

It’s true that you can’t use Dorico’s rehearsal marks in quite the same way, but really all Finale was doing was letting you input system text using the rehearsal mark category font style (which you could also override per mark). You can accomplish the same thing in Dorico by inputting system text directly and applying the Rehearsal Marks paragraph style; you can even assign a shortcut key to create system text with that style already pre-selected. Since all of these section markers are short, it doesn’t strike me as taking longer to type them each time than to click through Finale’s dialog boxes.

One caveat: In normal Dorico usage, the border around rehearsal marks is set in Engraving Options rather than on the paragraph style. So to get section marks that look just like rehearsal marks, you would either need to set the border in Engraving Options to “No enclosure” and then set the border in the paragraph style, or create a new paragraph style based on the Rehearsal Marks style and add a border to it. See also this post, and this one.

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Check all the settings under Library->Engraving Options->Chord Symbols.

Jesper

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In order to add system text, you have to first select an item in the system (note, rest, barline, etc.) to indicate where you want the text to appear.

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I have been a Finale user since 2005 (as a bass guitar player too) and just switched to Dorico in 2024, I know what you mean about the expression entry things. As you pointed out Finale did it super easily and quickly especially if you assign macro for a particular symbol.

Unfortunately Dorico doesn’t have such customize-able expression / articulation libraries so I don’t think you can do the same thing as Finale. Probably one easy alternative for it is,

  1. Enter a text by using Shift + X.
  2. Select it (it turns in orange) and press R (=Repeat) key. Then it will be duplicated.
  3. Select the duplicated one and move it to the desired place.
  4. Press Enter key. Then a cursor appears to edit the text.

What we do is basically just copying & pasting, but it would save our time if we could find the best way to save steps.


250209_copying Guitar Solo rehearsal mark.dorico (595.6 KB)

A slightly easier way to do this is to select the first one and then Alt/Opt+click where you want it. You can also do this with any(?) item.

Oh yeah that’s absolutely better. Thanks for the valuable addition! Now we can save one step.

  1. Enter a text by using Shift + X.
  2. Select it (it turns in orange) and Alt/Opt+click where you want to paste it. Then it will be pasted there.
  3. Press Enter key. Then a cursor appears to edit the text. Press ctrl/⌘+A to select the content to overwrite.
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And welcome to the forum!

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Ctrl/Cmd+Return will also close the popover but keep the text selected (so you can keep Alt+clicking)

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Hi friends,
thanks a lot for all the suggestions.
It looks much easier now.

Best regards

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My apologize, I said “Dorico doesn’t have such customize-able expression / articulation libraries” but that was wrong. Dorico does has a similar library, some of symbols and texts can be registered as Playing Techniques.

The text things we discussed the other day is specifically for the custom rehearsal marks with enclosure shapes. I think many of other expressions like “slap” can be covered as playing techniques in Dorico.

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You can create custom playing techniques directly in Library>Playing Techniques
 These can be either text or glyph.

Similarly you can create custom Playback Techniques (Library>Playback Techniques
). You will need these sometimes when creating your own Expression Maps.

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This is what I do for rehearsal marks (Verse/Chorus etc)
Dorico’s Rehearsal Marks feature: shift A.

Little (funny) workaround: in the properties panel (cmd or ctrl 8) you’d have to alter a few things: for Chorus, change the index to 3 (C=3). Add suffix after that (horus).
Same thing with Verse: shift A, change the index to 22 (V=22). Add suffix (erse)

After a while, you’ll start to remember which letter belongs to which word :joy:
I always feel like such a coder when I do things like this. :nerd_face:

In Engraving Options you can change the appearance of the rectangle etc if you’d like.


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