question about playing back of MIDI keyboard-entered chord voicings

Dorico
1

I only recently realized you could enable the playing back of chord symbols in Play Mode by enabling the chord track and assigning a playback sound. However, what I’m wondering is: is there any way to:

  • input chord voicings the way I’d like them to sound
  • afterwards go through and (if necessary) re-spell the actually notated chord symbols
  • have Dorico still play back the originally performed voicings?

I ask because I’ve definitely had situations in jazz where I’d like the voicing to be more “complex” or “sophisticated”-sounding, but still have the symbol be simpler to ease in the sightreading (and to give the performer more of their own interpretative latitude later).

Thanks for any help -

  • D.D.
2

If you input the chords with a MIDI device, like a keyboard, chords playback uses the voicing you used to input them.

3

Yes, but my question is: is there some way to subsequently manually edit/change the resulting, notated chord symbol while still retaining the voicing that I originally input from the MIDI keyboard? Right now when I try doing this the playback defaults to a “stock“ voicing wherever I edited…
D.D.

4

No, if you edit the chord symbol in Write mode, the voicing you played in is replaced with a default voicing.

5

Any thought (down the line) of allowing us to voice things more “nicely” but then afterwards being able to edit the chord symbol to reflect something simpler, while keeping the originally MIDI-entered voicings (by, for example, clicking on the edited chord symbol and in Properties choosing “retain original MIDI performance”, but obviously a much hipper implementation than my suggestion?) I ask since I can think of many situations in jazz where the desired sound of a voicing might be slightly more complex (even something like C9 or C13) but where you’d want the notated symbol to still say “C7” for simplicity…

  • D.D.
6

You could enter the voicing you want on a separate track instead of trying to channel them through the chord function.

7

But then it wouldn’t play back unless that track was actually visible (since Dorico lacks the equivalent of Sibelius’ “Focus on Staves”). However, I suppose the “jazz” way would be for me to simply record piano comping “behind” slash regions in the piano part and use that for score playback - I just thought it might be nice to be able to enter a voicing for a chord symbol via MIDI that actually includes (for ex.) the 9th (“C9”) but then afterwards have it still playback as such but appear in the score as “C7” (etc)…Not a biggee, though (I’m amazed that I didn’t even realize I could play back chords at all until now - extremely useful!)

  • D.D.