Hello all,
I’m about to undertake a large personal project, and I was hoping to find some tips before I start.
Quick background: I am a very experienced Sibelius user, almost exclusively working with small ensemble commercial music (cruise ship musical director for over 10 years, lots of singer charts for 3-5 horns and rhythm). I have been using Dorico since version 3, but have been out of the cruise ship business for most of that time so never developed the deep knowledge or muscle memory I had with Sibelius. That being said, I think Dorico is an infinitely better program and want to learn!
My project: I am planning to start working on a book for a wedding/party band with 3-5 horns, and one of the key features of this book will be using Newzik to organize and read for all members of the band. I want to be able to have clean PDF’s of each song in the original key, while also being able to load in the XML file for the score to facilitate last second changes (an example might be the singer called in a ringer who sings everything down a step and 2 of the horn players are ringers as well who can sight read but have never done the show so I don’t want them trying to transpose on the fly).
My challenges: In it’s current state (Dorico 5) I am struggling with a good workflow for slash notation
-Slash regions do not export to XML, nor do they allow for rhythmic notation.
-Slash voices seem to create more chaos than help in terms of when they start/stop. They also display as a 2nd voice with whole rests above them when exported as xml into Newzik.
-Slash noteheads and removing stems in engrave mode (and suppressing playback) seems to be the only viable option, but that feels like a lot of steps and I’m hoping someone has stumbled on a better way.
In a perfect world, I’d love to see Dorico implement some kind of system where you can type in a rhythm, select the area and “insert slash region” and have it convert to the correctly notated slashes. Perhaps treat all written notes as stemmed slash notation, and any quarter note or larger rests as stemless slashes? And then export that in XML the same way with playback suppressed. I realize this would kill Dorico’s ability to hide a written out solo for playback behind slashes, but I feel like a more intuitive easy to use engraving method for slash notation might be more valuable to most of us.
I’m also envisioning a future where I can easily make slight adjustments in Dorico for iPad, and export them to the Newzik library during rehearsals.
Anyhow, thank you for reading, and I appreciate any feedback.