I’ve seen a few forum posts kind of related to this question but not exactly what I want. I have a score wherein I sometimes want the bass player to read from the bottom of the piano part and other times where I want him to have his own stave to read from. All players will be reading from the score so I don’t care about individual parts and their appearance. I would like to have some systems where the score displays only the piano part with chords appearing above the bass clef (LH) of the piano, not above the RH/treble part. On other systems I would like to display both the bass and piano part, with chords appearing for both.
When I go to input chords the chords appear on both the piano, bass and violin part, even in systems with nothing notated in the bass part. When I tell Dorico to hide empty staves in engrave mode the bass part does not disappear. I assume this is because it has chord symbols in it.
Questions:
How can I, in the simplest way possible, determine which staves chords appear on? I’d like the most flexibility possible, including sometimes displaying chords in the bass part but not the piano, and vice versa, and sometimes displaying chords over the RH of the piano part and sometimes over the LH.
How can I hide the bass part? Is it not hiding because there are chords in it?
Am I missing some crucial way of thinking about this that is unique to Dorico and will likely drive me insane?
I don’t understand what you mean. Why not just copy the needed music to the bass player staff and avoid confusion?
If you want to save some vertical space, then, instead of duplicating the notes, just write on the lower staff of the piano an indication (as staff text) like “+Bass”, in the passages where the Bass player should “read from the Piano”
You can set the players to display Chord Symbols only in Chord Symbol and Splash Regions, then, after adding the desired Chor Symbol regions, in the places where you need them in the middle of the piano staves, select the chord symbols and use the property Placement: Below:
thanks christian. To answer your first question, not that it should matter, this bands reads from a score and the bass player sometimes reads from the piano part and sometimes his own depart depending on what’s going on in the music. So sometimes I want to hide the bass part and sometimes I want to see it. I wasn’t able to hide the bass part before because it was populating with the piano’s chord symbols. Now I’ve got it working… I just have to constantly menu dive to create slash regions.
I think I’ve got things more or less working now with the chords but it still seems cumbersome compared to Finale when I could just type the chords where I want them.
I didn’t know about this placement above/below function you mentioned in the bottom display thingy. I can’t seem to get that to work. My options are all greyed out.
Probably you don’t jet grasp the advantages of having global chords in Dorico, where you can decide their visibility based on the Player settings or, as explained, the Chord Symbol regions. If you need other methods (for your particular workflow) you can also use local Chord Symbols (just press Option(Alt) while confirming the chord with Enter, in the popover). But please take some time to learn how Dorico works in this area, and the advantages it offers, before remaining committed to old habits:
You probably don’t grasp the usefulness of just being able to put the chords wherever I want instead of having to menu dive, create key commands, have two different types of chord classifications…
I appreciate your help but I’m not convinced at all that Dorico is making this simpler. It’s another example of Dorico trying to be helpful and just causing more work.
You assign once the key command once and you have it for ever, and no more “menu diving”.
Normally you only use global chords, and decide where to visualise them: so there is only one classification, and customisable ways of visualisation.
And if you use local chord symbols: this are for specific usage where you need for example different chords for a particular player, but can be used also in other ways (like: write this chord now and only for this player). So you have your desired “put the chords wherever I want”, if you would like to ignore the global functionality and continue with your habit
Please provide a real world example (Dorico file) of what you want to obtain, and I am sure someone will show you the great advantages and flexibility of how Dorico treats Chord Symbols.
