So I’m trying to produce a guitar tab version of some existing lead sheets. Just the vocal melody as some nice single note guitar…
So, the good: After I copied all the notes and lyrics into a new guitar instrument (shifting everything down an octave so 90% of it isn’t on the high E)… and it’s overall surprisingly decent. Even chord symbols work well, and the defaults are reasonable.
However, the lyrics are A: placing themselves between the notation and tab staffs, causing all manor of barline collisions, and B: generating a 2nd set of verse numbers below the tab staff.
I tried creating a project similar to yours, with two guitars (player 1 using notation and showing chord symbols and chord diagrams, player 2 using tab and not showing chord symbols or chord diagrams - using the various options available in Setup mode and Layout Options > Players > Fretted Instruments).
My procedure was as follows:
Enter notes and two verses of lyrics in the first player.
Select the first player (notes and lyrics) then use Edit > Filter > Notes and Chords (to leave only the notes selected), followed by Edit > Paste Special > Duplicate to Staff Below.
In a similar manner: select the first player then use Edit > Filter > Lyrics > All Lyrics (to leave only the lyrics selected), followed by Edit > Paste Special > Move to Staff Below.
The end result was:
Player 1 had notes, chord diagrams and chord symbols.
Player 2 had tab notation and 2 lines of lyrics.
There was no extra set of verse numbers - possibly because I used Move rather than Duplicate for the lyrics.
Obviously the verse numbers shouldn’t additionally draw below the tablature, so we’ll definitely take care of that, but I think it’s probably to be expected that the lyrics draw between the notation staff and the tablature? I don’t think it would be a good idea for the lyrics to be shown above the notation staff, and showing them below the tablature would also be non-optimal because things like tied notes are (usually) shown less clearly in tablature.
I’m afraid there’s no way to do this at present. Lyrics don’t have the capability to erase their background because you would normally not show them in an environment where barlines are occupying the same space.
I agree that in a choral setting, barlines aren’t and shouldn’t be a factor, but there are certain instrument-plus-vocal lead sheet situations I’m running into where they are (tablature + lyrics like above, piano grand staff with vocal/lyric guide, etc.). Shouldn’t be the highest priority, but +1 from me for a solution at some point in the future.
Instead, an option to don’t prolong barlines into that “in-between-space” when lyrics are used?
So that there are no barlines occupying the lyric space to begin with in these situations?
(Normally, one could of course separate the song melody/lyric from the guitar. But to show both these combined as OP wants, without a disturbing barline, that may be a possible little feature to add).
Well, it’s not really a supported use case for lyrics, of course. Dorico will one day have a proper feature for harmonic analysis so that you won’t need to use lyrics.
