I have a guitar piece that’s 2 bars per system. I want to use an Ossia staff under one system but I need the bar spacing to be different than the ‘parent’ bars, because I need to fit more notes in the second bar in the attached image (in fact it needs to contain the same triplet groups as seen in the first bar). Is there a way to do this? I fear there isn’t because the bar line for the Ossia bar extends right up through the ‘parent’ staff above.
I tried to drag the dotted half note over so that it looks nicer but couldn’t. I then tried to delete it and re-enter it, and got this odd looking result below. Obviously Dorico wants me to enter the notes where the bar used to be and not where it is after dragging it around. By the way when I click in the Ossia bar to enter notes, the orange grid markings are similarly displaced so I can’t enter a bar of music that will look right there either. Can anyone suggest a way around all of this? Must I create a new player, enter the notes I want, then hide all bars except the two under the bars in the main part, then maybe shrink those bars down so that it looks a little more like an Ossia staff? Can I selectively hide bars in a player like that?
In case this helps anyone, I found a solution. I ended up adding a second player, then hiding all bars except the two I was dealing with. I then used Staff Size to reduce the size and ended up with this.
Not the most elegant solution but the client is fine with it
As mentioned in the initial post, the two bars in question with an Ossia bar added initially appeared by default like this, not like yours which are closer to equal width.
I needed more room for several triplet figures in the second Ossia bar but try as I might, I couldn’t get the bars to display as equal width in a useable way. When I used Engrave mode to try to make the bars equal, I got a situation where although they appeared to be equal in width, Dorico was not going to allow me to enter notes at the beginning of bar two. Instead Dorico thought that the beginning of bar 2 was still where it was before I started adjusting the width. This can be seen here, where the orange grid markings are strangely positioned (this image shows the two bars preceding the two in question).
It may be the case that I just don’t know how to get Dorico to make these two bars equal width in a useable way. I tried for a long time. In any case, my issue is solved.
I didn’t do anything special here. As soon as you start entering the triplet notes in the ossia bar (or paste them in), it expands to fit them. In this regard, it works the same way as a staff for a different instrument.
That looks pretty neat. But the material that needed to go into that second ossia bar was new, not cut and paste, and when I tried to click on the grid to start entering notes, the grid was shoved over as shown in the last post here, and Dorico just wouldn’t put any notes on the left side of the bar. Again, Dorico seemed to think that the first beat in the second Ossia bar started in the same physical position as the second regular bar was before adding the Ossia, way over to the right, even though I was able to make the newly added second Ossia bar wider by manipulating the handles in Engrave Mode.
You don’t need to make any manual adjustments at all – you can just go into the ossia bar and start adding notes, and the bar will get wider to accommodate.
