Some thoughts about chords in 1.1

Dorico
1

First of all - I’m super impressed by what you have achieved in four months! Everyone that hasn’t done it yet should check out the version history document

You’ll be stunned by the amount of new features and fixes!

I have a few comments about the chord implementation

  1. It is great!

  2. Can you consider allowing Ø to input half diminished chords in the popover? Really convenient for those of us with a scandinavian keyboard.

  3. Having the chords between the staves in a grand staff is amazing. However, the horizontal spacing looks odd. Am I missing a setting?
    Skjermbilde 2017-06-28 kl. 16.15.26.png
    It looks somewhat better with the horizontal setting set to ‘left’, but I prefer ‘centered’ on normal staves, so a separate option for grand staves would be useful.

  4. When I select a bar containing a chord symbol, I’m not able to enter note input. Neither with Enter or Shift+N. Both takes me to the chord popover. This doesn’t happen with other popovers, so I suspect it might be a bug. If I select any other object in the bar, it works as expected.

  5. If I drag a chord symbol in write mode, it deletes other chords as described in the version document. This is fine. However - Cmd+Z doesn’t always seem to bring them back. Is this a bug?

  6. Global chords are great! I know that you will add some features to this later, so I’m sure it will be the best thing ever.
    May I suggest ‘Hide’/‘Show’ signposts that hides (or shows) all chords until told otherwise? These could be added from the popover.

In big band charts, it is common to have chord symbols for horn players only in the solo sections. These can even be present in all horn parts. The way it works now, I imagine there will be a lot of hiding. With the new powerful filtering function, it is not a big problem, but I think it is worth considering.


Hope you’re all enjoying a well deserved holiday!

2

Thanks for your comments. I’ve made a note of your suggestion to allow Ø to produce a half-diminished chord.

Chord symbols are spaced in a similar way to lyrics (except that they’re never wiggled left or right to reduce rhythmic distortion) so when you ask them to be centred, they are centred. I don’t think you would really want the first beat of the bar to be moved so far to the right that the first chord symbol would not collide with the barline, really. In future I hope we will be able to allow items like chord symbols, dynamics, lyrics and so on to blank out barlines, as I guess that might be the best overall solution.

The dragging behaviour for chords is the same for most other items, e.g. clefs, dynamics, etc. Most items are only allowed to exist singly at a given rhythmic position, so if you drag them over each other, then the one you’re dragging effectively obliterates any others it meets along the way. However, Ctrl+Z should undo the entire operation, so I’ll look into why that might not be the case.