A couple of questions

Dorico
#1

I’ve been having some confusing behavior in my project.

  1. How do I get the percussionists to use max 2 staves and change instruments within the same staff? I thought it would happen automatically?

  2. Why are the rests in the top winds being broken up instead of appearing as bar rests (Page view)? How can I fix that?

  3. Why are the Xs for unmeasured bars not appearing in the top winds (Page view)? How can I fix that?
    the persistence of memory.zip (702 KB)

#2

  1. I believe it’s the fact that you’ve created local time signatures individually on each of the staves in the percussionists’ parts that is preventing this.

  2. Unfortunately you can’t edit the rests on condensed staves at all at the moment. This is a restriction that we are planning to relax as soon as we can.

  3. Local time signatures are not currently mirrored on condensed staves. At least for the first one in the third bar, I don’t think this actually needs to be a local time signature since, unless I’m missing something, everybody in the ensemble has an open meter bar starting there. Wherever you possibly can, you should use global time signatures instead of local ones.

#3

  1. Is there a way to work around that? I can’t have the full score looking like this.

  2. Is there no solution to this problem?

  3. If I put a general time signature instead of a local one, it will put a barline even on staves where I specifically don’t want one, like the timpani. This problem is recurring more and more as the project goes on. Is there any way I can fix it?

#4

Is there a way to enter text in the place of a time signature so I can fake it?

The time signatures in the flute for example, work well in the first bar, why not the second one onward?

#5

There’s no solution for changing the rests on a condensed staff that I can think of, no. Perhaps somebody cleverer than me has an idea. But I can’t think of anything better than saying that you might need to fix this by editing a resulting PDF in a graphics editor at the end of the process, I’m afraid.

For the time signatures, unfortunately what’s needed is a feature that doesn’t yet exist in the software, which is a means of defining two global time signatures and assigning instruments to either of them, so that in fact you don’t need to use any local time signatures at all. This is something that we plan so that it’s easier to handle polymetric and indeed polytempo music, but it’s not something that is possible today, so you’re quite right that using global time signatures isn’t possible, since those global time signatures will end up “interrupting” the open metered music in the other instruments.

You can certainly create text that looks like time signatures if that is helpful – see e.g. this recent thread.

#6

Thanks Daniel, so I can work around 2. and 3. but what about 1?

For the parts, I can create a new file that only has those time signatures so that it condenses right, but what about the full score? Nobody will accept a full score of uncondensed percussion. I’m okay with faking instrument changes if I must, is that an option?

#7

I suppose the only other approach for the percussion I can think of would be to assign each percussion instrument to a separate player. This would prevent instrument changes on the same staff, of course, but it does mean that any player whose instrument is empty on a given system will be hidden by way of the normal mechanism for hiding empty staves, or you can use Manual Staff Visibility to hide and show them. Your percussion part layouts would then each have to have three or four players assigned to them.

#8

Will it look right if the final score if I do that? I don’t mind using workarounds, but I need it to look right at the end.

#9

Yes.

#10

How does that work if it prevents instrument changes on the same staff? It looks like it might be best for me to fake instrument changes by typing out instrument names with SHIFT + X. The first system for example, I don’t want to have 3 staves for perc. 1. Two is the maximum I can have, so it I might just have to fake it in these circumstances. Daniel’s proposed idea can work if the instrument changes are aligned with system breaks only.

Also I can’t use the condensing feature in this project as it’s creating way more problems than its solving.