Greetings! I desire to continue to have my sheet music look the same as it did in Finale, so am now beginning the process of making a template.
Currently, I make a piano arrangement of my Bible verse songs, placing the chord via chord “tool”, but then as an “expression” (?) have inserted an ellipse-enclosed chord letter that a guitarist could alternately play, with a notation at the bottom of the page as to which fret to put the capo on. The symbol is affiliated with the measure, but not the note.
I please need to know how to create a letter+suffix enclosed in an ellipse to insert, attached to the measure, if not the note. I have pondered the idea of creating faux chords that include “invisible spaces” that would leave space for the “actual” chord, & attach both directly to the note, or type them both consecutively, but even with that idea, I do not yet know how to create an enclosure to visually separate them. I do not want to settle with using parentheses.
I am sharing a sample of my collection to show what I wish to reproduce with Dorico.
also- I need to learn how to have the little angle-brackets that indicate the intro.
Thank you so much for your help as I maneuver through this new platform!
There is not a native way to accomplish this using the chord symbol input. If it were just a few, I would say it could be hacked. I am racking my brain to think of a way to scale this in Dorico and I can’t think of anything easy. If you are looking at a large number of these, ideally you need something that is relatively fast and east to input. I’ll send you a DM.
For the intro and outro brackets, I made a tiny font called Intro Brackets. You can install this, and then type A for the start and B for the end. 12pt size works pretty well.
There are other things you can do, like make these into custom playing techniques, or create a paragraph style for them, depending on how many times you’ll want to create these.
Staff text is attached to a rhythmic position in Dorico, but you can reposition it in Engrave mode. If these circled expressions are always to the right of a chord symbol, then you could define the paragraph style with a horizontal offset of a few spaces, so that it avoids the chord symbol at the same location, and also adjust the style’s distance from staff. It’ll still take a little manual adjustment, but this is what I get out of the box:
I have a custom line for something like this, with analyticsStartStimme and analyticsEndStimme as the start and end caps, and a blank body.
These are a bit thicker than the brackets you and the OP have. I’m not sure if there’s something more appropriate somewhere in the SMuFL spec. I guess you could also import graphics for the end caps.
Yeah I found those much too Sharpie. There isn’t anything comparable in Bravura; I’ve scoured the font. It’s sort of surprising, as these are very common.
Thank you so much for the welcome & offer of assistance, Dan!
In Finale, it was just a “normal” letter that was enclosed in an ellipse that I used to function as a visual insert on the page, with no playback setting involved. (of course, the “real” chord symbol DID have playback capability) Yes- “a large number” need to be made to be at-the-ready in a template library to select from. (also, in Finale, a circle works for a single letter, but results in a huge circle when there is a 2-character chord, so I’m glad I thought to try the ellipse option & got a nice oval that hugged closer to the text)
Chat gpt has educated me on the different “philosphies” of Dorico & Finale- that the latter was focused on the sheet music aspect, whereas Dorico is based on the music & less on the graphics aspect…
Thank you, Dan, for sharing these! Sadly, because I have Dorico 5, a message came up tellin me that the info is not compatible to transfer to my system!
Is there a way to teach me how to replicate it?
Hi, Asherber! Thank you so much for showing me what is possible! Could you direct me how/where to learn to “define a paragraph style with a capsule border”! So much to learn! (sigh- such a challenge to be “a beginner” all over again after having Finale being 2nd nature after using it since 1996!) btw, I always had to manually adjust the circled chord every time! The possiblity of making a “defined…offset” as a time saver is intriguing & delightful!
And would I be able to save individual entries in a libtary to select while using it as a template? thanks again for your kindness!
I suppose that capital letters would be acceptable, although minor keys are commonly lowercase… Could you direct me there, Asherber? Thank you so much!
Yes! I am dismayed, as they are in hymn books, etc.! I created a custom shape in my Finale template, but it is not “absolute” as it somehow would stretch or shrink when entered on the page, associated with a measure, so required manual tweaking every time…
Here’s the manual section on creating paragraph styles.
My post above showed the settings you would need to change in a new paragraph style to get the capsule border. A little below those are the settings for default distance from staff and horizontal offset.
You would add these markings as staff text, with Shift+X, and choose your new paragraph style from the dropdown in the formatting toolbar.
No, but it’s easy enough to type each one as you go. If you save your paragraph style as a user default, by clicking the star in the paragraph styles dialog, you could also go to Preferences > Key Commands to set up a dedicated shortcut for staff text with this style.
I think this would be visually confusing, but you can take a look at some of the fonts available here:
Dorico and Finale do indeed work in different ways, but to say that Dorico is focused less on “the graphics aspect” is completely incorrect. BTW, the consensus around here is that much of the advice about Dorico that you will get from chatbots is misleading or incorrect.
I dunno, I wouldn’t be dogmatic, but I do think it’s accurate to say that Dorico is more semantically oriented, whereas Finale is more graphically oriented. There are advantages and disadvantages to both emphases. In Finale, it was much easier to make crappy-looking scores if that’s what you wanted.
It’s common for new Dorico users to find that a “simple” change seems complex to achieve, because there’s generally a commitment to preserving some underlying semantics, so they have to do it the “right” way rather than the quick way. Good for long-term scalability, more difficult when you “just want to put that thing over there.”
Yes, I would agree with that. I guess I was interpreting the report of what the chatbot said to mean that Dorico somehow didn’t care about how things look, or that the results in Dorico don’t look as good.
