Hello!
I can’t figure out if there’s a way to generate the old bass clef for French horn (where everything is notated an octave lower than is customary today) and use it automatically.
I can’t make head nor tail of ‘Clef Override’ in Setup Mode, and I’m not sure if that’s the right place to look either.
Can anyone help me?
(I’m currently editing old, unpublished French horn studies that often switch back and forth between the treble clef and the old bass clef. I want to keep the old bass clef, as it produces a much cleaner and more legible appearance than notation using the modern bass clef – besides, it’s more authentic in these cases.)
Many thanks in advance!
I can’t think of an automatic method, but wherever you input a bass clef, you can set its Octave shift property to 1.
If you want the old notation (Bass Clef = +1 fourth and Treble Clef = -1 fifth), you could set up the instrument definition like this
When you need the treble clef, choose this one:
And in Music Symbols, change the G clef ottava bassa clef to a regular G clef.
Result with playback (view in transposed pitch):
Or the other way around: choose the regular horn, and for the bass clef, use this one:
And change it to a regular bass clef in Library > Music Symbols.
Example here with the second method:
French Horn- Old bass clef.dorico (1.5 MB)
Excellent explanation @charles_piano !
I would suggest also a variation on @charles_piano’s method. Instead of changing clef symbols around, you can create a new horn instrument (starting from the existing F horn, and using New From Selection) and define it as Charles has shown above. Then give your player one of each horn, write the music on two staves as appropriate, and let Dorico’s instrument changes feature take care of combining the lines.
The only drawback is that you’d need to hide all the instrument change labels. You should be able to do this by selecting one, doing Select More a few times, and then hiding them in one go, but in my testing, toggling the Hidden property with multiple instrument change labels only hides the first one.
