Anyone know where in Dorico to find symbols for the handbell techniques: mart, mart lift, echo, gyro? Been using Dorico for a couple of years, however, now’s the first time I’ve notated a handbell piece with it, and can’t seem to find them anywhere I’ve looked. Apologies if I’m missing something! Thank you for any guidance.
They definitely exist in the Bravura font (see here: Browse the glyphs | SMuFL)
You may need to add custom playing techniques that use these glyphs, if they’re not already there.
We do indeed not currently have any default playing techniques defined for the handbells symbols in Bravura. Hopefully you won’t find it too arduous to add them, but do let me know if you have any problems doing so. You might find this helpful in figuring out the Engrave > Playing Techniques dialog.
Thank you for the fast reply. Is Bravura included some place in Dorico, or is it an extra font I need to find somewhere and load? Apologies, am a “font dummy,” traditionally have avoided loading them on my Mac. If you can provide a little more detail in how to do this, I’d appreciate it.
Other question with handbell scores, composers often need to enclose certain (bass) notes in square brackets, other bass notes in arrow brackets, and yet some other bass notes in curly braces (related to whether notes are played by 4, 5 or 6-octave choirs), all in the same score. Are these easily found and applied to individual notes, or must there be a workaround?
Thank you for any help or advice you may have to offer. Dorico’s been great, however, the handbell score has presented some unexpected challenges to notate, am really hoping I can continue to use it for this particular purpose without spending an inordinate amount of time.
Bravura is the default music font for Dorico, so it is already installed.
The Bravura font is very much “built in” to Dorico. The Playing Technique Editor is well-documented, and you might find this video useful: How to Use the Playing Techniques Editor in Dorico Pro | Getting Started with Dorico 2 - YouTube
Curly brackets around noteheads are harder - you can copy glyphs (that’s the images themselves) from the SMUFL website I already linked to, then paste into Shift-X text, set the Type (Style? I can’t remember) to “Music Text”, size as you wish, turn off “Avoids Collisions” in the properties panels and drag into place (in Engrave mode). If you’re lucky, someone who isn’t currently at a choir rehearsal might explain that more fully…