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:
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.
Is there any possibility to have the shortcuts of Dorico most similar to those of Finale?
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.
How to add to measure the Chord name?
See attached example.
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 havenât already, would strongly advise that you take the time to work through the First Steps exercises
By assigning the same shortcuts, you may think that the functions work in the same way, which in a lot of case, they donât.
I know itâs tough, but itâs really important to learn Dorico from the ground up. Remember that you probably didnât take just a few minutes when you started in Finale. I know I didnât!
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:
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.
Weâre going to need you to try just a little bit here. This isnât Finale so donât assume it works the same way. Go to the online Help, type in rehearsal marks, click Enter, and youâll get links to all the rehearsal marks settings, including how to input them:
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.
Itâs true that you canât use Doricoâs 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 doesnât strike me as taking longer to type them each time than to click through Finaleâs 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 âNo enclosureâ 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.
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 doesnât have such customize-able expression / articulation libraries so I donât think you can do the same thing as Finale. Probably one easy alternative for it is,
Enter a text by using Shift + X.
Select it (it turns in orange) and press R (=Repeat) key. Then it will be duplicated.
Select the duplicated one and move it to the desired place.
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.
My apologize, I said âDorico doesnât have such customize-able expression / articulation librariesâ 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 âslapâ can be covered as playing techniques in Dorico.
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 TechniquesâŠ). You will need these sometimes when creating your own Expression Maps.
This is what I do for rehearsal marks (Verse/Chorus etc)
Doricoâs Rehearsal Marks feature: shift A.
Little (funny) workaround: in the properties panel (cmd or ctrl 8) youâd 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, youâll start to remember which letter belongs to which word
I always feel like such a coder when I do things like this.
In Engraving Options you can change the appearance of the rectangle etc if youâd like.