I have to hand it to the Dorico team. Today, I set about creating a task where I was to make some practice sheets for chord progressions. My goal was to take about 16 exercises moving through the progressions, to transpose it into 12 keys, and finally to be able to place it in my iPad at the piano.
I’d assumed I’d put in the progressions into a file, then copy the file and make 12 transpositions of each one, and then finally print to PDF for the iPad. It turned out to be so much more elegant than that.
First, I needed to make bars without a meter. Maybe I could just hide the meter and the barons? It turns out. there’s a meter called “open” that allowed me to do that. The progressions are just isolated whole notes for readability.
Then, I put each progression in a flow, but could I title each progression type before it appears in the page? Yes I can, by adding flow titles before each flow,
Now I have 16 flows in my file. I could transpose each one for each key, leaving me with 192 flows. Or, I could duplicate the file and have a file for each key. It would be terrible if I found a mistake in the original, because I’d have to regenerate the other 11.
Maybe there was a way for me to use the layout system for the transpositions? I made duplicate piano instruments, with different transpositions, and put them all under a single player. I thought I could make 12 layouts for each of the transposing players.
But it turned out to be way easier than that! I just needed one piano, but a layout can override the transposition for everything in it.
So I was left with one group of flows for all the exercises, and made 12 layouts, each with a different transposition. Now I could change the key of my exercises, just by choosing a different “current” layout.
The beauty of this is that I have one layout (in C) and everything I do to that source piece of music will be automatically transposed in the other layouts, including all the notated chord changes. It’s remarkably tidy!
Last, but not least, I was going to print to PDF each layer to transfer to my iPad for practice.
In the end though, I could just share the original file over iCloud and load it up in the iPad. Pretty close, but the pages were still laid out horizontally which made it hard for me to just scroll from top to bottom. Well, that’s easily changed with the layout options so I get each individual page from top to bottom.
I didn’t even have to print them all out, since the iPad version has a “read” mode which removes all the toolbars which turns Dorico into a sheet music document which I can play at the piano.
I had to refer to the manual a lot, and ask ChatGPT for ideas, but in the end, I had one copy of all the exercises, which could be dynamically changed to any key I wanted, and I could even use the end document, by turning Dorico into a music document reader.
Every time I asked if it could do something, i got the answer “Yes! And by the way, there’s a more elegant way to do it” It just said yes to everything I threw at it.
Well done Dorico developers! This is a remarkably deep program.