Ex-Finale user, second time coming here for help. For the record – I now LOVE Dorico. Finale closing shop was the best thing to happen to my workflow in creating sheet music for my students and myself. I wish I had switched sooner!
On to my question.
Here are some examples of staff-attached text that I often create and use:
So yes, it’s obviously functioning like a rehearsal mark, but Dorico will not let you create rehearsal marks that begin with a lowercase letter. So I could use an index of “9”, for example, and then add a suffix on “ntro” and this would give me a rehearsal mark of “Intro” with the rectangular border I want. But I really prefer lowercase.
I don’t want to manually create this staff-attached text every time it’s needed, obviously. In Finale, this would be called a “text expression”, and could exist in a library file.
The obvious choice for something analogous in Dorico seems to be Playing Techniques. This seems to be where I should create any type of text label that will be used repeatedly. I’d like to open a template in Dorico, and have something exactly like the intro, verse, and chorus labels you see above, already existing in my Playing Techniques panel, ready to put anywhere I need it.
The problem is that a Playing Technique does not have a “Border” property. Thus, unless I am missing something, what I want seems impossible going this route.
Is there a way to do what I want?
I did search the forums, but couldn’t find anything addressing this. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
The right method for this in Dorico is system text (that shows in every layout).
Define a paragraph style with the border
Shift-Alt-X to create system text, and assign the paragraph style
You can align it with the left edge of the system in Properties. When you’ve got one set to your liking, you can copy it elsewhere with Alt-click and just edit the text.
If you want this style in all future projects, set it as a default in the paragraph styles dialog. Once it is a default, you can even assign it a keyboard shortcut.
I guess that would make for an interesting feature request, an additional Sequence type for rehearsal marks: Letters/Numbers/Bar numbers/Custom which just ignores the alphabet/numbering sequence altogether and just gives jou a text box. You can already mix and match letter and number RM’s with prefixes and suffixes but just about the only thing they can’t be is all-lowercase…
The issue with playing techniques is that they attach to specific notes/rhythmic positions on a single staff, not to barlines, and not across multiple staves.
System text is indeed the way to go here.
Yes, this has been requested from several angles. Sibelius has a built-in paragraph style that mimics the border and attachment of rehearsal letters, but lets you type arbitrary text.
Right… well, creating the text I need on the spot is basically what I have been doing.
I guess what I was asking was, is it not possible to just have what I want already waiting for me in something like Playing Techniques? Well – I see that it’s indeed NOT possible with Playing Techniques because of the lack of a border property, so I was wondering if there was another way.
In other words… sure, it’s not a problem for me to type “intro” or “verse” or “chorus” into my score with a specific paragraph style, but it would be nice to have it already predefined, just awaiting my click for use. After all, that’s why things like “con sord.” and all the other predefined playing techniques exist. Those simple pieces of text could be typed in manually too, but the idea is that if something is used all the time, it’s more convenient to implement it the way Dorico has done.
Not a big deal. I’m still learning. Because I want a border, I will have to type it in every time. Or just have the labels “chorus”, “verse”, etc, just already existing as system text in a template, and then just move them to where I actually need them when I start a new document with them.
Certainly I can see the use case, and it is pretty common. But playing techniques aren’t the right thing semantically because they attach to (and apply to) a note or passage. This attaches to a barline, like a rehearsal mark.
I hate to bump just to concur, but I do want to acknowledge what you meant by “semantically”.
Having made the switch from Finale as soon as the announcement hit, I can say that this point you make is one of the attractive things already to me in Dorico.
Finale had gotten to just be layers and layers of “workarounds”. The idea of starting design fresh from the ground up, as Dorico has done, means that ultimately, the goal is for there NOT to be such “workarounds”. Or at least that’s the feel I’m getting from browsing these forums for a few weeks now.
I also like knowing that those who actually built this thing are here and are taking notes. I hope I am right in that – knowing I am pretty committed to Dorico now – I will see how the subsequent updates I plan to be along for the ride for, reflect the input from us users.
Sure never got that with Finale.
But yes, I agree that what I’m talking about shouldn’t exist in Playing Techniques. As for the current way Rehearsal Marks works (which is essentially what I’ve been talking about…I just couldn’t use all lowercase there), I hope the whole “count up to what letter you want, enter that number, and then add a text suffix” workaround is done away with too. Rehearsal marks should be able to be whatever text, in whatever length or case, is desired… with the option to have an actual sequential index or not.
