A general collective orthogonal basis combining the zero-phonon and one-phonon excitations in the quadrupole and octupole modes together with rotational motion is constructed in order to allow diagonalization of quadrupole-octupole-rotational collective Hamiltonians in the future. Such a collective approach would enable one to search for the fingerprints of the high-rank symmetries (e.g. octahedral, tetrahedral, …) in nuclear bands. This task could be performed by considering, e.g., the inter-band and intra-band electromagnetic reduced transition probabilities λ ( )B E within the eigensolutions of these Hamiltonians.