Lyrics entry without melody

Hi All,

Trying to use Dorico to create guitar partsfor my bandmembers.
I’m only aiming to create chords and lyrics.
I can add the chords without any problems, but when trying to add lyrics, it’s expecting the melody do it can align. Is there any way to override this? I have added slashes (/) to all my bars.

Any help would be appriciated.

You could hide the notes after entering the lyrics.

I wish it were a little easier to enter lyrics untethered from notes. You can place the caret anywhere and enter a lyric, but it would be much easier if there were a way to advance the popover in the same way that the chord symbols popover advances: either by beat or by the rhythmic grid.

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Yes. It does seem very restricting and prescriptive.

You could also create a second stave with the melody, enter in the lyrics, then copy the lyrics into to the empty stave (they will maintain their rhythmic position) and hide the stave used for entry.

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Has progress been made with entering lyrics that are untethered to accompaniment such as chords? Romanos’s suggestion to create a second stave with the melody, enter in the lyrics, then copy them into the empty stave and hide the stave used for entry seems like a long way around the barn. Could we just type plain text not tied to a staff, not lyrics text?

As I see it, lyrics have 2 advantages over staff text for this: they go at the right vertical position without adjustment, and they make horizontal space automatically.

To place many words under a chant tone, for example, you can type Shift-Alt-Space between words to keep them in the same lyric object. See this thread for more details and some discussion.

If you just want lyrics with chords and no staff, there are much simpler tools to produce that.

Thanks for your reply, Mark. When I tried Shift-Alt(Option)-Space after selecting either a note or rest on the staff, or a lyric word, only a loudspeaker icon flashed. And on the staff there’s an adjustment that could be helpful to make—except that there need to be words where rests are. (Think tango rhythm, as in the song “Hernando’s Hideaway.”) After an 8th note, Dorico wants to put an 8th rest and a quarter rest; I want the 8th note to be followed by three 8th rests. How would I convince Dorico to allow all of those 8th rests? And to let me put lyrics where the rests are?

Use explicit rests — that is what you would do with any other notation app.
With Dorico, it seems tricky, because we seldom need this. Using force duration is probably necessary too. And of course, all I am referring to now are solutions that do work, but check out before reaching out to them that Notation options > Rest doesn’t have the setting you need (because it does have settings that can solve this kind of problem, but on a Flow basis). My 2c.

You probably enabled scrub play-back, which is another area of the program. Scrub play-back does not get enabled if you are writing inside a lyrics popover (shift-L), the idea being that instead of writing one syllable at a certain rhythmic point, you can write series of words separated by unbreakable spaces, so that the lyrics popover does not advance to the next note as it would with spacebar.