Obviously Dorico 5 is a long, long way off, but just thought I’d get some requests in early, LOL!
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It would be great if there was an easy way to offset a chord symbol by a grid value in one staff without affecting others. Since Alt+arrow moves a chord location wherever it occurs, maybe Ctrl+Alt+arrow or Shift+Alt+arrow or something could just move one specific chord and make it Local. This would make it easy to do something like the following where the piano and bass need to see the chords at different rhythmic positions. As of now if the user wants to ensure it is lined up exactly and won’t move if the layout changes, there is a lot of adding and hiding additional chords (or Local input and hiding the other unneeded chord).
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It depends on the player, but some bass players often don’t want to see extensions past the 7th as it won’t affect their line anyway. Some sort of option to limit extensions to 7ths (including any alterations of 5ths) would make it easy to do something like the below. As score and parts would need to match, I’m not exactly sure how this would work, if it could be in Setup, or part of a yet to be developed fully-featured Instrument Designer.
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This came up recently but an option to display concert chords on specific transposed parts would occasionally be useful. Like the above, perhaps this could be selected in Setup or as part of the instrument definition.
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There’s still no way to specify a global suffix alteration baseline position. By sharing a physical baseline (and not optical) the alterations don’t appear balanced. Here’s an example:
The sharp and 9 aren’t balanced, but because the #9 isn’t a composite that would appear in the editing window below, there’s no way to make a global change to this suffix. Assuming I don’t need double flat or double sharp roots, counting 12 notes, plus the 5 chromatic alterations of black keys, plus Cb, Fb, B#, and E# means that’s 21 different chords I need to create in my default file just to ensure a balanced 7(#9). Of course I’d need 21 different 13(#9) chords, 21 different 7(#9#5), 21 different 7(#9b5), etc. Balancing all sharps and flats very quickly leads to hundreds of entries (and a lot of work) under Project Default Appearances. An Engraving Option to allow for a vertical offset for sharps and flats in suffix alterations, would help accomplish this with just a couple of settings. -
Alternatively, allowing the user to simply create a suffix library that would override any of the Engraving Options would accomplish request #4 too. This way I would only need to create one 7(#9), one 13(b9#5), etc., that would look exactly as I wanted it. A popover text box would probably be required like for Playing Techniques, and if I’ve created an override for a common suffix like 7(#9) it would be great if I could reassign any existing popover text to my version of it. It could also allow the user to easily specify more advanced chords which I wouldn’t necessarily expect Dorico to ever support like this:
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Obviously this is already a known issue, but while improved in D4, the Edit Chord Symbol Component is still quite buggy and not WYSIWYG. In order to get that chord above to appear correctly in the score I had to input this into that window:
Obviously it’s not trivial or it would have already been done, but it would be great if the issues with this could get worked out. -
The new parenthesized chords are great, but there is still often a need to have multiple chords occupy the same rhythmic location. If they could work like lyrics where you just arrow up/down to the next chord pass that would be great, or maybe if any subsequent local chord would automatically go above, perhaps that would work too.
I know these are a lot of requests on the heels of a new release. I’m obviously not expecting to see any of these soon, but I’d love to see some of these implemented in D5. Thanks for considering!