More options for displaying capo chords

• Aug 30, 2024 - 11:53

I do a lot of writing for guitars using rhythmic slash notation - so essentially, just reading chords. I often want to show both the concert pitch chords and the chords transposed for a capo, to give my players the choice of whether to use a capo or not.

I found the option in Style -> Chord symbols for 'Capo fret position' - and this is almost exactly what I need! However, there's a couple of things stopping me from being able to use it.

1) This setting should be per instrument, not a global style setting. I have other instruments (mandolin, ukulele, etc.) that also have chords, but that won't use a capo. However, setting the capo fret position affects all chords in the score. I need to be able to control which instruments show the capo chords.

2) The default formatting of capo chords is nonCapoChord(capoChord) - e.g. F#m(Em). I don't think this format is ideal - it would be really useful if we could customise the layout of capo chords, or at the very least have several options to choose between.

In particular - I would like to have capo chords stacked above the non-capo chords:
capo_chords.png
In my experience, this is a much more common way to display capo chords (and certainly in my case, it's what my players are used to reading.)

(There is a workaround for all this - enter the non-capo chords as normal, transpose the whole part to the new capo key, copy the transposed capo chords, undo the transpose, and paste the chords back onto the part so that they appear above the original chords. However, this is very clunky. And, more crucially, it's very easy for the order of the chords to get switched, e.g. when copying and pasting, so that the non-capo chord actually appears on top - requires a lot of manual checking of every chord to make sure they're in the right order!)

Attachment Size
capo_chords.png 12.33 KB

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