"Refresh Page" option?

I’m getting bogged down in formatting and it’s becoming a big turn-off for me for Dorico.
For example, in the guitar part for this one chart, I made a change (I added a line from the piano part to it–doubling). But this minor edit threw the entire formatting for the guitar part off.
In Finale, I could just hit “refresh” and any overlaps or other crowding would be fixed.
Do I really need to go in and tweak the guitar part locally/manually???
I thought Dorico was good about noticing conflicts and resolving overlaps/crowding?


Latin Doll.dorico.zip (1.2 MB)

It is, but you’ve made many manual adjustments and overrides.

Delete all system and frame breaks. If needed, undo all staff spacing. That will likely fix it.

Mmmmm. It would get round to displaying the things it hadn’t bothered to display up to that point; not convinced it would ‘fix overlaps’.

But I agree with Dan: you’ve probably done too much, such as fixing with Breaks, manual edits. You should barely need to make any manual adjustments for a piece of this sort.

I’ve tried deleting system & frame breaks and it didn’t change much. How do I “undo all staff spacing”? (Incidentally how can I select all system and frame breaks to delete them en mass? I tried right-clicking and selecting the option but it didn’t do it.)
I’ve decided I want to add the tablature to the top of the flow for the electric guitar (just each chord that’s used in the chart), but I can’t get that to work–Dorico just leaves a huge space at the start of the flow between the title and the start of the music. Why’s that?
Here’s an updated file.
Latin Doll.dorico.zip (1.2 MB)

Dorico can’t create the required frame to show the chord diagrams because the first page in the electric guitar has been overridden. Try right-clicking that first page in the Pages panel in Engrave mode and choosing Remove Page Overrides from the context menu.

Thanks Dan. That fixed the huge space at the beginning.
There are still some issues with layout, however, now that I have this huge chunk of “these are the chords that you’ll use in this tune”.
A. Small issue first: I forgot under what menu to look to select “chord symbols only” throughout the part ( IOW if I’ve presented the chords at the start of the flow, then I don’t need the tab-boxes throughout the part, just the lettered-chord-symbols).
B. As you can see, there are still some overlap conflicts occurring. But as you can also see, I’ve got signposts un-hidden, so deleting the system/frame breaks will not be a possible solution anymore. Again, I thought Dorico handled such conflicts on its own. Furthermore, on page two, Dorico has reduced my top margin to nearly nothing. Is this something I will need to manually edit?
Thanks.


One further question, now that I’m learning how guitar-tabs work in Dorico.
And this would be for any #guitarists (@guitarheroe ?) out there…
Is Dorico accurate in its choice of fingerings with regard to playing chord-under-melody voicings? For example at rehearsal A, can that Dm11 be voiced as diagrammed under the stated melody? If not, what’s a better way to notate this?
Thanks!

Note: It seems that Dorico just chooses the first (default) chord diagram in the “show all variants of chord diagram”–instead of having any connection to which diagram places the melody note at the top of the voicing. Any way of making these diagram selections “smarter” Dorico team?

To show only chord symbols above the music, in Setup mode, right-click the guitar player, and from the Chord Diagrams menu, choose No Chord Diagrams.

When you have chord symbols and/or diagrams above the staff, you might want to increase the top music frame margin on the Page Setup page of Layout Options.

1 Like

The default tab positions that Dorico provides are generally unusable, especially in this musical context. This is, because the tab system has no link to positions on the neck and tries to bring all the notes down into open position. The tab you notated in your example is fairly nonsensical, this piece should be easily playable in V. position, however!
Same goes for chord diagrams, the provided diagrams are in no way automatically linked to the notes in the melody staff, any intricate chord-melody stuff that needs to be reflected in diagrams, tab or both will need to be entered manually.
Any future development in this regard, if it provides some, however small, automated solution to this will be an absolute game changer and obviously very welcome!

Good luck to you!
Sincerely, Benji

1 Like

So you’re saying I would need to sit down, either with a map of the guitar fretboard or a live guitarist, and go through each melody-note/chord to notate the voicing for each, right?
That said, there’s probably no point in having a “tab-legend” at the start of the part, then either, right?
Basically, when I go to have the tune performed, I’ll need to hire a competent jazz guitarist who knows what they’re doing and can translate non-tabbed chord symbols into good music, huh.