I am working on a rehearsal piano/vocal part for a sung-through musical. On the advice of a pianist who rehearses actor/singers, I want to add chord symbols to this rehearsal piano part. When I generate chord symbols from the full orchestration, the chord symbols appear on every staff. The only way I know how to get rid of them is to go player by player and select “Chord symbols>hide for all instruments.” This is very inefficient and time consuming. Is there a faster way to get the chord symbols to appear only on the piano part? Also, I would like chord symbols at the top of the conductor’s score.
And, the generation of chord symbols and all of the showing or hiding seems to happen only on a flow by flow basis. Is there an efficient way to generate chord symbols across the entire project and get them to only appear on the piano part (which appears only in the rehearsal piano/vocal score) as well as on the top of the conductor’s score?
I was surprised to read that the chords popped up in all staves when you add them to the rehearsal piano, since most instruments have chords turned off by default. But then I read about the chord generating function (which I’ve never used) in the manual, and learned that:
During note input, chord symbol regions are input spanning the duration of the selected note or item, which is usually the last input note.
When adding chord symbol regions to existing music, they span the selected duration on each selected staff.
The players holding the corresponding instruments are automatically set to show chord symbols in chord symbol regions and slash regions, even if they were previously set to hide all chord symbols.
So what you are doing is adding chord regions on all those staves. It seems you might better off generating the chords from your piano part rather than the full orchestration? (Or type them in manually.)
I don’t think I can get the full chords into the piano part. A large part of the orchestral accompaniment to the singers is different groups of instruments playing different rhythms, almost like they are talking to the singers or each other. What I’m trying to do with the rehearsal piano part is to get enough of that into the piano part so that the singers will be comfortable and feel familiar with the the aural cues they are getting from accompaniment once the orchestra and singers are joined together.
So, I need to generate chords based on the entire accompaniment. Or, perhaps I’m misunderstanding the purpose of the chords in the piano vocal part. I don’t have any formal training in composition.
If the chord symbols are only for the pianist, you only need chord symbols for the chords the pianist must play; so you should be able to generate them from the reduction.
Just a thought. If you create a dummy piano reduction, you could use that for (an unplayable) reduction, but also to create the chord symbols. This would stop the automatic generation of symbols on other parts. Once you are happy with the chords, show them on your rehearsal piano and delete the dummy piano reduction.
Thanks Derek. I’ve done some searching on “piano/vocal score” and “lead sheets versus piano/vocal scores”. From that I guess that my conclusion is that rehearsal piano players appreciate the chords even in a score where the notes are all written out. One site said that the chords help them learn the music faster. At any rate, I’ll follow your suggestion and hope that works for the piano player.
I tried reducing all of the pitched instruments into a second piano player and then generated chords. Since chords in the first piano player were not hidden, they show there as well. I deleted all of the music in the second piano after that but am keeping it around to use for the remainder of the flows.