to be exact: Solid vertical lines with right-pointing hooks.
That’s my favorite way to denote a guitar barre. It’s preferred because sometimes you want to lay down the barre to finger a note when a chord containing that note comes on a subsequent beat.
I have done my due diligence to find instruction on this topic in the manual, without success.
Specifically I would like to end up with a line or collection of lines able to encompass any number of strings from 1-6 (maybe 7 later).
I would like to be able to place this line next to any note I choose.
Whether or not all my wishes are granted I would still appreciate a pointer to a good source of info on these vertical lines with right-facing hooks, be it YouTube, or whatever.
And BTW, thank you all in the help crew for your timely and accurate replies.
The online manual doesn’t yet contain any information about the new line editor features that were introduced last week in Dorico 3.5, but there are quite a few pages on this subject in the Dorico 3.5 Version History PDF. You need Dorico Pro in order to have access to the line editors: they are not included in either Dorico Elements or Dorico SE.
The basic gist of it is that you will want to create new line annotations to provide the barre or string indicators in Engrave > Line Annotations. You could create text items like Roman numerals, and you can use music symbols for numerals contained within circles.
Then in Engrave > Lines, you create a new vertical line, e.g. based on the existing vertical line with right-pointing hooks, and change the start or end cap to your new annotations.
Right. (For me this is all happening in Write mode. Maybe they changed it?)
The Edit Lines editor doesn’t change the line body length as I hoped. It draws the vertical line to encompass the highest and lowest note in the chord. OK, I can move notes to other voices to avoid that, but…meh.
If all else fails I will follow your suggestion and use Roman numerals, but I prefer the lines. I believe them to be cleaner and contain more information for the amount of horizontal space used.
How do you do the Roman numerals, if you don’t mind me asking without digging for the answer myself? It’s getting late in the day.
It doesn’t matter how much you do, somebody always wants more, I suppose. I used to write firmware. People tended to leave me alone.
You can make the vertical line encompass notes in different voices by Ctrl+clicking the notes in the voices you want to be enclosed before you create the line.
You should use the Edit Lines dialog if you want to automatically connect the barre indicator to the top of the vertical line.
Then in Engrave > Lines, … and change the start or end cap to your new annotations.
That appears to change the length of the end caps, not the length of the vertical line. Is there a way to change the length of the vertical line?
It seems as though the vertical line length is fixed as the vertical distance between the top and bottom notes connected by the note stem regardless of which note(s) got highlighted.
You can adjust the length of the lne in several ways, either by dragging it in Engrave mode or (probably better) using the Properties panel, where you can snap the line outward to other staff positions.
I never would have found that. Thank you!
Followup entry now in my notes:
Item 10 is according to your instructions as I understood them. Item 10a notes that in today’s session nothing appeared in the “Common” box of the Properties panel. Purposeful floundering revealed the happy result 10a.
- Barre brackets: Write mode, select “Lines” icon at all the way screen right halfway down. Select “Vertical” in the Lines box immediately to the left. Place a bracket. Select and adjust “Top position” and “Bottom position” in Properties panel below. To adjust right/left, Engrave Mode, use Option-RightArrow Option-LeftArrow. *This worked the first time. Next day, no Properties panel appeared, so…
10a. If nothing appears in the Properties panel, go to Engrave mode after placing bracket. Handles appear on bracket. Option-Up/Down/Right/Left Arrow all work.
and after a program restart (not system restart) for other reasons, behavior reverted to 10 (see above)
You will always see something in the Properties panel provided you only have items of the same type selected. If you select e.g. a note and the line, then you will only see the properties that are common to both kinds of items, which isn’t very many. Make sure you have just the line selected, and the Properties will show up.
I have one more question now that I have done some work with vertical lines as guitar barre indicators.
Moving the lines a little to the right closer to the notes is easily done in Engrave Mode, which I inferred from the logic you have taught me about Dorico.
But as usual there is just one more little thing that would be nice: selecting multiple (i.e. all) barres at one time and scooting them over to the right the same amount all at once–a big convenience.
Another more important thing concerns me, shown in the screenshot. I noticed that moving the barre rightward closed the gap with the right side note but widened the gap with the left side note, yielding no net improvement. Since adding just one last barre snapped page 4 to page 5, I was hoping that closing the right side gaps would reverse the growth to five pages. It didn’t. Is there any way around that?
The software still enabled me to get back to four pages by other means, but there are two pages to go editing this piece. It will almost certainly go to five pages before this is done unless I can narrow that gap with the leftward note.
As I get used to this software I like it more. I wouldn’t go back if I could.
You can select multiple vertical lines with Ctrl+Shift+A (Windows) or Shift-Command-A (Mac), which is the shortcut for Edit > Select More. Then you can adjust the position of all of the selected lines in Engrave mode by activating the ‘Top offset X’ and ‘Bottom offset X’ properties.