Flamenco Guitar Rasgueado Notation (Dorico 5 or higher)

Dear community

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Dear community
I am looking for ways to combine rasqueados with fingering. The attached pictures show many different ways to notate rasqueados.
I could not find answers to the following questions yet:
Is it possible to tie the fingering to the arrows in the right hand?
If you change the text of the long arrows next to the note in Dorico, then this text is always aligned with the arrow. How can I write/attach the text under/over the arrow with the layout that I use for the right hand fingering?
How can I add an arrow to the stem of the note? One thick, one thin, like in the pictures.

I would be very grateful for your help.

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Unfortunately, Dorico does not provide those stem decorations. We only have the tremolo ones yet. This is probably a perfectly valid feature request :wink:
[Edit]: I’ve edited your title with rasgueado which I think is more accurate word for this technique (at least, it’s the spanish word used for that). I hope you don’t mind!

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Yeah I hope the next update (been saying that every update haha) will bring more features and improved things in guitar notation.
As we like to joke in french among musicians : “you kick a trash bin in the streets and it spits out a guitarist”
As Daniel mentioned in a thread that the future of Dorico at Steinberg depends on sales as well, I think the team has a bit overlooked and underestimated the huge market of guitarists, that are still using Guitar Pro because of so many features that simplify our lives (bending panel, custom chords panel, harmonics notation, ability to loop sections and accelerating/decelerating by a percentage of bpm or set bpms every X loop to practice ; even things like handling the bars sizes where you just toggle and drag a handle to quickly resize bars, when in Dorico you gotta go to engrave, then to horizontal spacing, then select the handles and you can’t drag them you have to press Alt + an arrow and they are SO slow to move compared to GP where it’s so smooth and fast).

I mean it’s cool to have microtonal stuff and figured bass in Dorico I guess for those who need it, but those are a niche compared to the amount of guitar and bass players ; for those guitarists/bassists who are not composers, sticking to GP is fine, but for those of us who are as well composers and need the capabilities of Dorico in general it’s frustrating to see how it’s still way behind GP in terms of capabilities, even after 7 years.
I’m definitely sure there would be a huge spike in sales if Dorico had those capabilities, as it already does way more in all other areas…
But well as a dev myself I know that what we want is not always the easiest to program/code, I just hope those things are not here yet because of how they’re difficult to program rather than because of overlooking the fretted instrument market (but to be honest those features were already present in GP3 when I started playing guitar in 2001, so I’m not sure whether it’s because of coding difficulties, although it’s probably not the same framework/language) because that’s a huge miss on sales if so.

Anyway, still wait and see !

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Even though Dorico doesn’t provide up and down arrowheads as stem decorations, you can use the Edit Music Symbol dialog to replace two unused tremolo decorations with your own custom arrowheads:

Image

Choosing the right characters for the arrowheads from the fonts available to you, scaling the characters appropriately and positioning them on the stems of notes takes some effort, but you only have to do that once. Since my operating system is Windows, I used the character 0x36 from Webdings for the down arrowhead, and the character 0x28C from Lucida Sans Unicode for the up arrowhead. Both characters were scaled to 50%.

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Hi - a long shot, have you already been trying a back-and-forth workflow between GP and Dorico (via XML export/import) to try and smooth things a little…?

Yeah but it’s cumbersome ; I don’t know on which side something goes wrong (I think on the GP XML export side) but a lot of things need to be redone/corrected in the end so I always end up redoing from scratch in Dorico

Understood.

I’ll guess it’s an area of continual assessment and improvement - there’s often MusicXML updates of some form I see, at each Dorico release. I imagine the same largely applies on the GP side too.

But all that of course, ahead of welcoming (core) app updates, the like of which you describe above.

Meantime, no promises, but another quick suggestion:- you could craft a cut-down dummy file in GP that displays those choice ‘friction’ points you’ve found, export a MusicXML output of that and attach the results here - in the hope the team can take a look at some point in the future and see where improvements might be made (if any - could be a number of reasons why the two aren’t playing nice together .!).

Anyway, not long now till the next Dorico update. Maybe some nice surprises…

Good luck.!

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Thank you very much for your help. I think Dorico can still improve a lot on this point as far as special fingering and playing instructions for guitar are concerned. I will send a request to Dorico.

Your request has been heard here, no need do send your wish somewhere else. :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the info. I understand that Doric also follows the forum, of course. I also marked the post as a feature request.

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I think you can easily do it in Dorico, see below:

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I raised a similar topic some years ago, and all I wanted was to place arrows on note stems. At the time, it seemed like quite a simple thing to add but apparently, it wasn’t considered important, and so it was a deal breaker for me and I stayed with Sibelius.

Clearly you did not bother to read @johnkprice’s earlier post about how to do this.

I did see @johnkprices’s post but the message I got from that was that it was only possible to use different arrow styles for the up and down strokes. This would not be aesthetically acceptable for a commercial publication. If I am wrong then please tell me if the up and down arrows can be the same style using Dorico.

John was matching the graphic in the OP, in which the arrowheads differ in style.

There are suitable down- and up-wedges in Bravura at U+EB8C and U+EB88, respectively.

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If you look at my second screenshot, the arrows are all in a line, like in a lyric line, and directly underneath is the fingering for the left hand. It would be best if the arrow was linked to the fingering. I am looking for this type of setting, which is apparently not yet available.