I have been having a hard time transitioning from Finale to Dorico. Many things about Dorico, I really enjoy, however, I have increasingly noticed a lack of flexibility and control in a number of areas. My biggest point of contention is the lack of being able to input non-traditional chord symbols. For example, I have been working on the lydian chromatic concept as a means of analysis and further, as a source of ideas and sounds for compositions. In Dorico, If I want to convey a scale or general source for the improviser, I have to write something like Cmaj7(b3, #11) - which is also hard to input/ impossible, when I and the musicians I work with would much rather see modal-style chord symbols such as C Lyd.Dim - C Lydian Diminished, abbreviated. Have people found a way of easily customizing chord symbols in this way rather than entering them as lyrics or spending and obscene amount of time editing chord symbols? Thank you, Joe.
I’ve never tried to take the “rocket ship down the Mississippi” myself, but I’m wondering if customizing the Modal Chord Symbols in a library would be reasonably simple to accomplish. Wiser minds than mine will no doubt weigh in soon.
Have you spent time with this — or is this the “obscenely long” approach you mentioned?
Are you willing to “hijack” other chord symbols and change them to the LCC ones you need?
Hey Judd, thank you for your insight and suggestions. I have tried editing the chord symbol, though, what is obscenely long about this is the time it takes to edit the symbol, then editing each chord symbol that isn’t the original- when I edited the chord symbol which was originally Cadd#11 to C Lyd.Dim. (I am willing to give that up). For some reason though, I have to edit each other chord symbol (try to) with a different root because it displays incorrectly. (In chord input- Cadd#11 gives me C Lyd.Dim. but when I enter any other root- Aadd#11 it gives me A(add#11.Dim is it likely an error on my end? Also, there aren’t all that many more chord symbols/ extensions I want to give up in a given project. I’m wondering if there is another way to simply create instead of editing. Many thanks
Gotcha. I know this is a subject that comes up periodically, but I have no direct experience, I’m afraid, having thus far been satisfied using standard symbols/extensions and polychords.
Did that @FredGUnn post link offer anything helpful? He’s certainly one of the chord-symbol gurus here (though there are others), and you may be getting more useful replies soon. Wish I could help more!
Both of the links that you attached were helpful, great to reference, and go through, I appreciate it. From continuing to experiment with both of those methods, I am having to add all 12 notes and adjust the chord suffix from X(add#11 to then X Lyd.Dim. Many thanks Judd, I appreciate you taking the time to help!
It should be reasonably easy enough to take an existing modal chord symbol and make a global change to it with a doricolib file. Since Dorico doesn’t support full modal names, only abbreviated, I made a doricolib file that will switch between full and abbreviated names when I switch between Append period and Do not append period.
Since I think it already contains all the possible modal names, you can use it as a starting point to edit what will be displayed, even if you aren’t interested in the full vs abbreviated aspect of it. It’s been a long time since I made this, but it looks like you’ll need to change the value in two locations. First decide if you want the version with the periods or not, then change the text entry for each TextPrimitiveEntityDefinition you what to redefine, and also change the value entry for each corresponding ChordSymbolAppearanceComponent entry. Just pick a symbol to redefine and input Lyd.Dim. there.
Once you’ve modified the doricolib file, it will need to be placed in the Users/yournamehere/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 5/DefaultLibraryAdditions folder on a Mac. If that folder doesn’t already exist, you can go ahead and create it. Once you restart Dorico, your edit should be available in any projects started from File / New. You’ll still input the original popover syntax, so if you modify Aeol, you’ll still type CAeol into the popover to get CLyd.Dim. You can also bring this into existing projects using the Library Manager. There are plenty of walkthroughs on doricolib files if you search the forum. I’ll be away from my computer all day, but will check back in tonight if you have issues with getting it working. Once you get it working it will be available for all roots and all future projects.
(One among many!)