Notes in parentheses

Is there any way to add parentheses to a note?

Currently, I believe not. Use can use text, then move the parens into position.

Anyone able to give a little more detail on how exactly to do this? eg how do I insert a full-size quaver note head and stem using text? or force in an extra quaver note to a bar? (ie when splitting a crotchet into two quavers for a different word layout in a hymn verse? (I don’t want cue notes!)

Enter real notes in an unused voice (select where you want the extra notes, hit Enter, press v for an unused voice or shift-v for a new voice). Then hide the rests you don’t want by selecting them and going Edit > Remove rests.
Then use shift-x text to write brackets; fiddle with the font size until they look right and (in Engrave mode) drag them into place.

Any news in this subject?

For percussion instruments this is available as “Ghost Note” in the Note and Rest properties panel in Write mode. This is apparently not available for other instruments.

It sure seems like there ought to be a way to change the notehead to have parentheses.

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Have you investigated the Notehead Sets Editor (which didn’t exist until Dorico 2.1, released August 2018)? Should be simple enough to build a notehead set that includes brackets.

This is slightly off-topic, but with the enthusiastic and expert user base represented here on the forum, the future ability to import and export libraries (like notehead sets and custom PT) will result in a massive amount of shared resources. I can’t wait for that…

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Engrave menu, Notehead Sets.

You can create whatever you like there.

Now I’ve seen everything… Emoji notes! :laughing:

Not until I saw these comments. Very nice. I’d think Dorico should include a notehead set with parentheses right out of the (virtual) box, as that is a fairly common requirement. I will definitely set up my own for now.

We still eventually need a more elegant solution for putting parentheses around a full chord. Also an elegant solution for putting parentheses to the left and right of a phrase, such as the pick-ups often found in the final measure of a lead sheet. This could be accomplished by having a “left paren” notehead set and a “right paren” notehead set, but it would be much nicer to be able to select a phrase and enter a keystroke to parenthesize it.

Craig, you’ve probably just explained why this hasn’t already been implemented - it’s not as simple as just throwing together a notehead set that parenthesises individual noteheads. I have no doubt that when the team get through implementing all the higher priority stuff, they’ll come back to this and do it properly. I wouldn’t hold out for it happening in the next year or two…

I was able to create my notehead set for individual parenthesized notes.

There is one annoying little bug. I used the + sign to create a new notehead set. The name box was initialized with “New Notehead Set”. I double clicked on the word “new” to overtype “Ghost”. But after typing the “G”, the cursor went all the way to the end of the text, after the word “Set”. Of course, you can wipe out the entire text string and type in anything you want, but this needs to be fixed.

My real question, though, is how do I save this notehead set so that it will be available in all projects? It seems to be saved only with my score.

The “star” button is “Save As Default”. I’d love to see a sample document with your parentheses.

Another problem is that every publishing house has its own ideas about how parenthesised notes should look (what weight of parentheses, how big, how far from the note head, what to do with parenthesized chords, parenthesized notes with accidentals etc, etc), so providing a default set might not be much benefit to the people who would use it most.

I am confused by that. “Save as default” indicates to me that this becomes the default notehead set for all notes. I only will use the ghost notehead set on a few notes in each score. I don’t want it to be the default. I just want that set to be available in all my projects.

See the attached picture. I’m seeing some inconsistency in the stem attachment points on chords. I thought that was working, but you can see it is wrong in the second measure. In a chord, if the head farthest from the stem is ghosted, then the other noteheads line up correctly, whether or not they are ghosted. But if the farthest notehead is default, then the ghosted noteheads do not attach correctly.
Ghost.PNG

I’m sure what you say is true about house styles, and I will welcome a more elegant and comprehensive solution in due course. But I would wager than 99% of the output of Dorico, Sibelius, Finale, etc does not go through a publishing house, and I’d think a lot of people would benefit from having this set included today.

Note editor seems to be a good solution for parenthesis note. But I have this issues with chords.

Any idea to solve it ?


parenthesis.JPG