with Finale I’ve been regularly creating working sheets with empty staves. For example: Having a 2-voice setting, I’d enter both voices first. In the end, I choose for one voice “blank notation” with the staff tool, print the page, then do the same for the other.
In the end I have three versions, on “solution”, and one for each group of the class to for example sing from, while trying to hear and notate the other voice into the blank system.
How can I do the same in Dorico?
I would simply like to select a passage and hide all the notes it contains with one act, showing a blank staff in turn.
What if I want to have only some bars blank and others not? That would have to work differently, no?
By now, I really appreciate that Dorico is superior in many things, e.g. writing basso continuo. But I really have to say that almost nothing works intuitively, I have to google almost every single action I haven’t done yet.
Right now I was trying to select all notes of a staff in order to delete them all and I failed. Double click on the staff or the beginning of the staff didn’t work…
Would be so logical to right-click on a staff and then choose to hide the notes, wouldn’t it?
Can you show an image of what you’re after? You can remove rests from empty bars – is that not blank?
“intuitive” is just “what you’re expecting from previous experience”. You’ll get it, don’t worry. Dorico is very consistent and logical.
You can select the first thing on the staff, and then Edit > Select to End of Flow. There’s also “Select More”, which … selects more and more each time you press it.
Education worksheets where you sometimes want to show music in a bar, and sometimes hide the music in that same bar for other layouts, is not Dorico’s forte, I’ll grant you. … Yet!
I’ve found out that I can resize the notes to 1%. But that’s not very elegant, I find, since other elements (like basso continuo) are still visible then. Dorico could be better in that than Finale if it were allowing you to do that not in the writing but in the layout mode, so that you can have multiple layouts for e. g. the solution and the exercises.
In Finale, I find it very straight, logical and utterly helpful that you can precisely design a staff style (saying which elements shall be shown and which not) and then apply it to any section of any staff. What speaks against having that option in Dorico too?
Thank you, I’ve discovered that via Google too. Still, I find it more economical to just double-click on a staff than to choose that from a menu (even if you can program a shortcut).
Would be great if they knew about this weakness and were going to improve it, since Finale is no alternative any more in future!
Oh, they know. Members of the Dorico team read the forum regularly and take note of requests. And if you search the forum you’ll find many discussions related to educational applications like this. (They might also offer some suggestions you’d find useful.)
As Ben hints at with “Yet!”, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they will one day include more convenient options for “educational obscuring” of things.
I entered the music in a flow, then duplicated it twice, deleted the LH and RH parts in each respective copy, set Layout Options for no bar rests, and defined Layouts (complete, RH Only, and LH Only) with only the pertinent flow in each.
Thank you, that’s a good start!
What kind of duplication is that, not being just a layout duplication but containing different musical information?
I just see one bigger problem remaining for now: What if the visible part (RH or LH) also had an empty bar than shall then contain a whole note rest of course?
Maybe it’s easier to just duplicate the player, then copy the material over and create the cutout. After that we have two layouts already with the two versions:
but you can’t remove all the rests with remove rests though, you can only remove ‘all but one’
It was the hiding/showing bar rests in empty bars that I missed - I didn’t think to look in Layout/Players. This option does not remove rests from pick up bars though - I have to first make them explicit rests and then remove rest.
What would be much simpler is select then a command to hide.
What are you creating that requires the hidden bar rests? If it’s a worksheet that you’re intending to print out for students to write on, you could input the music that is the “correct” answer, then hide noteheads/stems and remove rests.
I’ve seen your other thread about a universal hide feature – it’s been requested before, and of course we understand the motivation behind it. However, in general we like to take the approach of understanding why you want to hide a given thing, in case there’s a more semantic way of achieving that effect.
For example: if you wanted to write in dynamics for playback purposes, but that you didn’t want to show, you can instead simply draw in dynamic automation data for the instrument. Likewise, the MIDI trigger regions feature, for triggering stuff in playback that would otherwise require a note written into a separate voice and hidden somewhere on the staff.
I get this, but the how to hide is also important. For example if I want to hide a some portion of a worksheet I need to
Switch to Engrave Mode
Select what I want to hide
Wonder why I can’t see the options to hide anything (it’s because my selection included an implicit rest, or maybe a performing technique or maybe something else…)
Hide Stem
Hide Notehead
Hide Accidental
Delete articulations and Slurs (in write mode, because, reasons), because you can’t hide them
Go back to other portions of the music as per step 3
convert implicit rests to explicit rests
remove rests
Switch to Write Mode
Oh, and now you want to unhide some of them?
so obviously you can’t work like this so you end up using hidden staves, different layouts - all the clever workarounds that I see on these posts.
or, you could just implement a contextually aware command, in Write Mode, whereby whatever is selected gets hidden. Just like in Finale, just like in MuseScore
of things.
