New user to Dorico, coming from Sibelius. I don’t do a lot of work in Notation - usually work right in the DAW. But I am really liking the separation of using Dorico to compose, especially now that I am using more live musicians.
That being said, I am working on jazz charts for a trio. Sorry if this has been asked before, but I couldn’t find it. For my writing and for ease of writing out the solos and such, I have written/“mocked-up” a walking bass line. Now, my bass player is not going to want to play this, nor would I want him to.I want him to add his masterful touch and experience.
I put in the chords changes so my question is - how do I deal with the bass lines I wrote? Do I simply delete them - will the chord changes remain? Or can I select the notes and hide them? What is the best way to do this to have your typical jazz fake book type of chart. Any suggestions on work flow would be appreciated.
You can cover the notes you wrote with a slash region, so they’ll still play back, but the part you print out will just show slashes and, assuming you choose to show them in the bass part, the chord symbols.
Awesome. Thanks Daniel - I was just reading about slash regions. So the notes I wrote will still playback for my purposes even if they are covered with slashes? Cool. That will be exactly what I need.
Yes, it’s an interesting approach that I will find very useful too, I’m sure. You can choose to show certain notes along with the slashes, if you want, which can also be very handy if there are certain notes that need to be picked up by the player, but you don’t need to specify exactly how.
Interesting. So do you do this by changing note heads to slashes? Or can you specify partial measures as slash regions? For now, I just changed the note heads as needed and it looks fine. My use was to show what rhythm the piano is playing during a bass solo.
Great question Kayle and great answer Daniel, as this is the sort of work I do as well. I like to create mock-ups so that the musicians that come into my studio have an idea of what I am after, but I don’t want to stifle their expertise by dictating note-for-note what they should play.
With slash regions I can hear the underlying music, with slash noteheads I cannot. A the slash regions only display according to time signature base, it is not possible to input rhythmic chords this way and have them play.
It would be great if slash noteheads would still play the original chords - a lead sheet with guitar chord parts looks so much neater with just slash heads for the rhythm, and the chord symbols above the stave.
Don’t forget that one of the great features of Dorico is that it is very easy to control what staves appear in the score. It is very simple to have one staff that correctly displays what the musician will want to read, and another staff that doesn’t appear in the score configured for playback only. The playback staff can just be used for any measures where the notation in the main display staff is insufficient for an audio mock-up.
You can specify whether or not slash voices should play back on the Repeats page of Playback Options. (That dialog is only available in Dorico Pro, however, Simon, sorry.)