Placing guitar chords on voice (or any instrument)

Dorico
1

Using Dorico 2 pro

I’m having a lot of trouble with guitar chords.

  1. Can guitar chords be put on a vocal line? Isn’t this a standard format for a lot of songs? Every line shows the hidden chords as little green flags, but the properties says they are not hidden. Changing the state to hidden and back doesn’t do anything.
    hidden chord symbols.png

  2. Is there any way to put guitar chords on any instrument. Ideally it should able to be selected independently on the full score and/or the parts. For example, if I have a solo voice with piano, it would be appropriate to have the solo voice part have chords, but leave them off the full score. In general, I can’t understand the logic of where the chord symbols show up and where they don’t.

  3. In a song with accompaniment by two guitars, the chord symbols show up on both guitars in the full score (I would prefer them over the voice). When I want to delete one of the sets, I have to select the chord symbols one at a time. Almost everything else allows a first-last selection. Can this be extended to chord symbols?

Cheers!

Ed

P.S. Dorico makes beautiful scores and I’m very happy to be switching from Sibelius. The unlearning/learning curve is a bit steep, but the final result has been worth it.

2
  1. Go to Setup Mode, right click on the Voice “Player” in the left panel and tell it to put chord symbols on each instrument.
  2. See above.
  3. Possibly see above - you may be able to tell it WHICH guitar you want to attach chords to. Also, there’s nothing to stop you doing a marquee selection (dragging a box around everything) and then going Edit > Filter > Chord Symbols. Certainly no need to select them one at a time.
3

Here is one option from layout options.

In Setup you can tell Dorico to show the chords only on a part rather than in the full score. (Right-click on the Player Box).

chords.png
chords.png700×259 65.7 KB

4

Thanks Derrek. I should really have remembered that option, since it was added at my request…

5

Me again … the guitar chord problem has come up as I’m moving songs from individual Sibelius files (via XML) into a book. I’ve been importing the songs one by one as additional flows in the book. As a test, I opened a new voice & guitar song (xml) as a new project, and the chord symbols appeared on the voice line! The switch was correctly set to not hidden, and switching it to hidden, well, hid it.
single file imported xml voice with chord symbols.png
When I took the same unchanged xml file and imported it, the chord symbols on the voice part turned into green flags.

Curiouser and curiouser :open_mouth:

Ed

6

Thanks, derrick and pianola! I was typing my follow-up at the same time as your replies. I was unaware of the filter option. I’ll test it out and see what happens. Ditto with the right-click options. :smiley:

Cheers!

Ed

P.S. A big part of the learning curve is just finding out where the commands and controls reside.