Guitar Tabulature - Slurs & Picking (Bow) Symbols

I’m relatively new to Dorico and would like to ask / request a few things regarding guitar tabulature.

In the attached picture you see a section I engraved in Dorico this morning, and I’d totally love to the option for the bow markings (which we guitar players use to indicate down and up picking too) to show just on the TAB staff, just the notation staff (that’s what it is in the picture) or both.
I don’t know if I am too blind to find the option for that, but I couldn’t find it in the engraving options for guitar tabulature or articulations.

And the second request would be an extra option for horizontal placement of slurs on the TAB staff (unless the slur crosses strings in which it should follow the lines). I’ve had the option ticked, so the slur ends appear outside the staff lines, when a slur crosses a system. this looks fine on normal notation, but if I have a note on a middle string and the slur not ends outside the TAB staff, this just looks wrong and I had to tweak them all in dividually to make them look good (see 2nd picture).

Also editing slurs is a bit complicated. I’d love to have the option (like finale and sibelius do) to move the first / last handle of the slur to completely shift the full slur with the opposite end point being the turning point and not change the shape of the slur like that, but rather be able to rotate it. Because at the moment you have to correct multiple handles to make the slur rotate but preserve the original shape, I hope this is somehow described so you can understand it :slight_smile:


Hi Nico - if you choose a downbow playing technique it only appears over the notation staff. But if you choose a strum down or strum up arrow from the guitar section of the playing techniques, it appears in both TAB and the notation staff, presumably because it is a guitar symbol. You could always add two downbow symbols and move one in the Engrave screen to the TAB line. I agree that since the string bowing instructions are often used in guitar music it would be good to have an option for them to appear on the TAB as well.

On the question about the slurs, I might have misunderstood your question, but you can flip the slur when selected from the lower zone.

For each playing technique, you can specify whether it should appear in both staff notation and tablature or only one or the other, via Engrave > Playing Techniques.

I used to know this and forgot… sign of old age! Thanks - I wonder if the down bow / up bow playing techniques could have the default setting to always show in tablature in future releases?

This actually helps a lot, I’m gonna try that now;)

For the slur behaviour I made a short video, it’s unlisted, so you can just watch it with the link it doesn’t show up in youtube elsewhere

Hold down the Alt key whole dragging slur handles in Dorico, and you should find that the behaviour is similar to that of Finale.

I will try that :wink: