I am little bit confused about using guitar capo in Dorico 5. I have a piece which is notated in E minor. This is to be played by guitar with a capo on the 3rd fret, which means that it would sound as G minor. But if in Dorico I insert a capo on the third fret of the instrument, it continues to sound in E minor., the fundamental pitch. Is there a simple way that I can make it sound as G minor, without changing any of the notation or tablature?
Thanks for any replies to this rather basic question!
In the “Edit Strings and Tuning” dialog, what do you have set in the transposition control at the bottom - the one labelled “In staff notation, written middle C (MIDI note 60) sounds as:”?
Notes in Dorico are stored at their sounding pitch, so changing the values in the Edit Strings and Tuning dialog will modify the notation/tablature rather than modifying the notes you’ve already input. You’ll then need to use Write > Transpose (or the shift-I popover) to transpose the notes in the project in the other direction - this will put the notation/tab the way you want it, and will also make it sound right.
If that still doesn’t seem to be working, could you post a project here, and we can take a look? It doesn’t need to be a whole song if you’re worried about sharing your work - just a bar or two is all I need to see what’s going on.
Changing the capo affects the tablature, but not the notation. The Edit Strings and Tuning dialogue doesn’t seem to affect anything. I’m enclosing the project for your perusal. Let me know if this is enough - *thanks! Alfonsina y el Mar COPY FOR TESTING.dorico (3.9 MB)
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Ah, right, apologies, there’s an extra step here which is optional - as some people want it and some don’t. So, starting from your project, what you want to do is this:
First, in the Edit Strings and Tuning dialog, add both the capo at the third fret, and set a transposition of Eb3.
Second, do Select All, then Write > Transpose and transpose everything up by a minor third. At this point the notes will sound correctly, and the tab will also be correct, but the notation in the score will be the concert-pitch notation rather than the capo-transposed notation.
Third, go to Layout Options for whichever layout the guitarist will be reading from, and turn on “Use fretted instrument transposition”
This is a bit fiddly partly because Dorico has a lot of options - for example, some people prefer to see the concert-pitch notation, particularly if other instruments are visible in the same layout - and partly because Dorico’s internals do everything at concert-pitch and you’ve started off inputting it in transposed pitch.
