Guitar Hammer Ons and Pull Offs, Slides and Bends

Hi,

Will Dorico be introducing formal notation for sldies/bends, hammer ons and pull offs for guitar. Right now, it’s not entirely clear what the proper procedure is for this. Is the intention for users to create their own notational symbols for this? Trying to understand how Dorico will be evolving not just for full score notation but also guitar. In particular, I am trying to create scores for a rock band project involving drums, bass, guitar, keys and vocals. I am trying to understand whether Dorico is a good fit for this. We are working on some fairly complex music and need to share a common score and lead sheet with the entire band and notate the parts.

Thanks.

-Jon

Further development of guitar notation and TAB is planned.

Slides, hammer ons, and pull offs have been possible in Dorico for a while now. Bends were introduced in v3 along with a lot of other guitar related features.

Another take on guitar bends, some folk may have already seen, here…

Any timeline on this? I feel it would be nice if the guitar notation things were in one single panel. They seem sort of randomly distributed.
I was motivated to switch from Guitar Pro (which is much better right now for guitar notation in most respects than Dorico) for two reasons:

a) I could not figure out how to accurately represent bend and release rhythmic values in GP 7. I don’t know or think it’s possible.
b) I liked the score aspects of Dorico and the design philosophy of multiple musicians etc.

It would be nice of Dorico could surpass GP 7 for guitar notation.

It’s certainly our intention to continue developing the guitar notation features in Dorico. Whether or not Dorico will truly surpass a mature and dedicated tool like Guitar Pro in every respect in the near future is perhaps unlikely, but certainly there are plenty more features for guitar notation coming in future, including in the next update.

A few weeks ago I bought the MusicLab Real Guitar package and am completely blown away by it. I mention it here because I’m now looking at their Strat package and there’s a terrific video showing the depth of their articulations and switching. I’ve no idea how you would notate a lot of this - or if you even should - but it seems pretty comprehensive to me.