The ability to change volume of a chord symbol inside a song is needed

• Jun 25, 2022 - 17:22

Hi. I have discovered the great value of using chord symbols inside my songs to play accompaniment to a song I'm writing. Thanks for making it available. Of particular value is the ability to change the instrument of a chord symbol. For example, using a chord symbol attached to a piano track but then editing the chord symbol to play violin background, is a great feature. I don't have to create and write a separate violin accompaniment track.

Volume control of the instrument played by a chord symbol is done at the beginning of the song, by lowering or raising the volume control slider for the "Harmony" slider in the mixer. That is very nice, but ... When playing a song, I have found significant need for the chords played by the symbol to change volume during the song, just as one would encounter when listening to any harmonious song. The background instruments in practically all songs change volume all the time to create crescendo or decrescendo. It would be great to be able to click on a chord symbol inside measure 42 for example, and lower or raise its volume alone, creating a crescendo or decrescendo for that chord.

Unfortunately, chord symbols now do not have the ability to edit the volume of individual chords. All I can do is raise or lower the overall volume slider in the mixer, but it changes ALL the chords, not just ones I've selected in a given measure.

Would it be possible to add a "velocity" field line to the chord symbol Inspector, so I can edit the velocity of individual chords within a measure(s)?

Thanks in advance

Frank G

Comments

• Jun 25, 2022 - 18:33

For this sort of detailed chord-by-chord editing of playback,. the way to do it is to add a separate staff for them, use the Tools / Realize Chord Symbols command to generate the actual notes there, then edit them as you see fit (adding dynamics, altering voicings or rhythms, etc). That way you have complete control. Then mark the staff invisible when you are done, and disable the normal chord symbol playback.

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• Jun 26, 2022 - 16:30

Indeed, if you only want to customize one or two things beyond the defaults, it can seem like extra work. But keep in mind, the one or two things you want to customize are probably different from the one or two things I might want to customize, or the one or two things someone else might want to customize. The question is, where to draw the line. And the choice that was made was in order to make this feature feasible to implement at all was, keep things simple and provide a facility that works for a lot of people in a basic way (eg, providing simple playback for lead sheets), and then for the people who want to customize, give them full customization ability via Realize Chord Symbols. Trying to anticipate every single customization people might want and then providing direct methods of adding those customizations via additional options makes the whole system more complicated overall.

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