There’s no reason why you can’t have a single system of full orchestra on one page, and several systems of only a few staves on another, both laid out well in the same layout.
Engraving Options ensure consistency, but most of those options can be overridden in the Properties panel for a given object. Notation Options are per-flow, but again you can always override them, if you want to.
If you want…, you can change the staff size, note spacing, and even the margins and the frame positions themselves, with or without a page template, on any given page.
I have a question related to this topic. Apologies if I should start a new thread, but “Adding a player and making it appear in a layout” is exactly what I’m trying to do.
I have a project with 30 flows. Players are vocal, piano, bass, drums, and guitar. For most flows, I want the piano part to only include the piano player. But for one flow, a recitative, I want the piano part to include the piano player and the vocal player. The point is for the pianist to follow along with the vocal line.
You could create a new layout in the right panel, and tick both the vocal and piano players on the left panel. And just tick the one flow at the bottom panel.
So I would have a Piano layout and a Piano+vocal layout? Then when I go to print the part, stick the piano+vocal layout into the piano book for that flow only? Hmmm. Seems like I would have some double-sided printing and page number problems. Is there a more elegant solution?
What I do in cases like you suggest is: create an additional player - just for the recitative.
Let’s call it Vocal (rec.).
Copy the music in that flow to the additional player.
Then for your piano layout (don’t add the Vocal, instead) add the “Vocal (rec.)” player.
Also exclude the “Vocal (rec.)” player from your Full Score afterwards.
You will end up with one layout for the piano player, with the added recit. in one flow only.
In this layout you may reduce the staff size of the vocal to something like 80%.
Or you could add all the flows to the piano vocals part, and use manual staff visibility to hide the soprano for all flows but one. Or use an ossia with a cue to the soprano, and change the cue size to full size.
You will have to Reset the layout - because it has to accommodate the lyrics of the vocals now. First try my suggestion of reducing the vocal staff size.
Thanks! Okay, dumb question maybe, but how do I reduce the vocal staff size?
Also, if I click “Reset Layout”, am I resetting the layout for the entire layout, or just for one specific flow? I don’t want to lose all my formatting for the other flows!
Thank you! I won’t Reset Layout then, because I don’t want to undo all the layout changes I made in the other flows. Here’s a screenshot after I reduced the staff size to 81%. Still some spacing problems, both in the vocal and piano parts. How to address this?
edit: this looks like a Scoring Express template, and we’ve already set the gaps between lyrics and hyphens so that they’re less generous than Dorico defaults.
It’s the lyrics, hyphens and gaps between lyrics that are forcing the music to be unevenly spaced - there just isn’t enough room for four bars per system. You can add system breaks yourself without turning off the automatic 4 bars per system that I suspect is set in Layout Options.
Ah, you’re right - my keyboard part has the 4 bars per system ticked, unlike every other part. Maybe that’s a Scoring Express template thing or maybe I checked it by accident.
I went through the manual links you share here and couldn’t find an answer to my question. I found the following statement:”By default, players are assigned to all flows that originated in the project, all full score layouts, and their own part layout.”
My question is: Can this default setting be reversed? The reason I ask is because I’m working on a book project and as I add flows, I have to go through every flow when I also add a new player that the new flow requires.
I don’t know if this unrelated or not to this topic.
In any case, thank you for your time and consideration.
