Guitar chords displaying a semitone below - no capo used

Dorico
1

I have a score where some of the parts were imported as Music XML from an older Sibelius score. Its a band score and its finished except the guitar chords are displaying a semitone flat of the other chords on the score. I’m not using Capo’s or any display transpose that I know of. It might be an import hiccup from the Music XML.

I’ve tried to change the instrument to something else and back but chords come back a semitone down again. I’ve tried putting a capo on and taking it off - nothing changes. Is there any way to override the behaviour?

2

Could you attach the project (or a cut-down version of it, e.g. the first bar or two)?

3

Here is an excerpt of the score

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ZldX8QMiiiz1aX2x407ZGUFsMvfgNTd5&usp=drive_fs

4

In the Players panel of Setup mode, select the “Acoustic Guitar” player (and I do mean the player, not the instrument), right-click and select “Capo Chord Symbol Definition”.

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In that dialog, change the transposition from C#4 to C4.

The crucial piece of information is that the transposition for chord symbols is separate from the transposition of the notation. This is because there’s a common convention in Piano-Vocal-Guitar music of writing guitar chords on a piano staff, which means the notation and the chord symbols do not always match.

1 Like
5

This solved the problem thank you. I was a long time looking through menus but didnt see this. Thank you very very much

6

I have a follow up question. I do want to display Capo chords on the guitar part (in this case Capo 1 first chord a C shape).

I now have a capo 1 on the guitar player in setup. I checked the layout options for the part and chose ‘show only transposed chord symbol”. The chords on the guitar part though are not changing. In terms of the score I sent what is it about the way its set up that I cant achieve this?

7

You’ll need to go back into the same dialog as in my previous comment and change the transposition there again.

8

Ah - but that brings me back to all of my chords having double flats and being very hard to read. If I leave it at this setting (I chose C#4 in that dialog again) then I need to have all of the double flats enharmoncially changed (e.g. Dbb becomes C). So how do I achieve this?

9

You probably want Db4 in the dialog instead of C#4.

10

:folded_hands: thank you so much. I dont know why I didnt think of trying that but you have saved me many further hours of trying to find the answer there. Thanks again