My name is Yasmin, and I am working for Dozan World Publishing. We’re migrating a choral-heavy workflow from Finale to Dorico and I’m trying to find the fastest way to handle lyrics when the same verse is sung by different parts/voices.
In Finale, our workflow was:
Enter a full verse once in the Lyrics Window,
Often copy the entire Lyrics Window text to another verse/track when needed,
Then use the Click Assignment Tool to quickly assign the verse to any staff/voice/passage.
This saved a lot of time compared to copying syllable-by-syllable.
In Dorico, it currently feels like we need to re-enter or copy/paste lyrics much more manually for each staff/voice, which is slow for large choir scores.
Question:
Is there an equivalent workflow in Dorico to reuse an already-entered verse and quickly “assign” it to another staff/voice/passage (similar to Finale’s Lyrics Window + click assignment)? Any recommended best practices for choral editors to speed this up?
If you want to duplicate a line of lyrics, this is what I do
Select all lyrics
Copy to clipboard
While lyrics are still selected, open the properties panel.
Change the lyrics verse number to the next highest number
Click on the first note of the passage
Paste
You now have two lines exactly the same.
While you still have the lyrics on the clipboard, you can copy anywhere you want. Select the note, paste
If the rhythms are identical, you can select the ‘source’ lyrics (select the range and filter for lyrics); then Duplicate to Staff Below or Alt-click.
Otherwise, you’ll have to copy the lyrics in one go, and then paste each syllable in the popover. (You can hold down Command V, and it will auto-repeat! – assuming no melismas.)
As of version 6, you can copy “Notes and Lyrics”; and when you paste in the popover, you only get the lyrics (obviously, because a popover only accepts text.)
In Finale, it was common practice to use a different “verse” for each staff, but this is unnecessary in Dorico, and actually not beneficial, if they are all singing verse 1.
At this point, I would like to place a feature request that allows you to paste the entire clipboard and automatically divide the syllables into notes until the end (or maybe tell me if such function already exists ).
Melismas could be moved afterwards using ALT+arrow keys. (BTW I love this keyboard shortcut and the fact that it can be used so consistently)
).