Changes to fermatas on single staff

How can I notate a pause with fermata for all instruments except the one that is playing a cadenza?

I first tried to make the fermata on that one staff invisible, but the alpha channel settings seem to apply to all fermatas at once, and I couldn’t find a way to select a single one.

I then converted the fermata to a breath mark and was able to hide that, but that only appears to be possible on the first staff.

On Changes to fermatas on single staves it shows a score where the fermata on the bottom staff has been overridden to a breath mark, but I can’t figure out how to do it…

Can you help?

You can do the usual “nasty trick” of dragging the fermata off the page in Engrave mode.

Ahahahahh, that worked :slight_smile:

But seriously, what is the help file referring to, then?

I also ran into this issue of giving the band a fermata while the soloist cadenzas…surely this is a common enough occurrence that it’ll be addressed in an update.

1 Like

The usual workarounds are either take the unwanted fermata out of the page in Engrave mode, or use Playing technique fermatas (that you create), so that you choose where you put them. Hope this helps

1 Like

Caveat: those do not like to be attached to bar rests. In other words: their placement needs to be the very last thing you do before sending to print.

It there a way to delete a fermata completely or set single ones?

Yes: create a playing technique that is a fermata glyph.

That has worked! Thanks Marc

You’re welcome Frank! You might want to save your new fermata playing technique as default, so that you can use it in any new project without having to recreate it!

Yes, thanks again Marc! Took me a bit to figure out it was the star.

I am liking this playing technique editor, Added some needed dim. and half dim. symbols from Opus Roman Chords* for functional analysis. (If a fully loaded Roman numeral system was added as a popover/notation toolbox… I’d be set.)

Getting more and more comfortable with Dorico.

Very late reply to this so it might not be helpful, but in the context of that bit of documentation - you can override a fermata with a breath mark on any staff, but you don’t select the fermata: select anything on the staff where you want a breath mark instead, or activate the caret and move it to that staff, then input a breath mark.

1 Like

Thanks Lillie, much appreciated. I did get this to work with single-staff instruments. I wasn’t able to do this with a piano, but that’s not a big problem :slight_smile:

any updates on that?

Nope.

Any forecasts from the developers? I don’t mean to be pretentious, but would it be hard to implement this in a next update? I believe this could be of interest for some Dorico users out there!

1 Like

One would think so!

David

I have the same problem of wanting to hide a fermata on a sigle staff and the workaround of dragging it off the page seems a bit “dirty” to me… It’s certainly not a proper way. The bug/feature of being able to replace a single fermata with a breath mark and then hiding it worked a while back, if I recall correctly, but, sadly, now it doesn’t. Can this be implemented somehow? Thanks!

1 Like

So the best workaround:
make for example a breath sign or a caesura or whatever out of this fermata (the way Lillie describes it) which you want to ‘remove’ and THEN you can scale this new sign in the properties panel to 1% and vanished it is :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

BTW: I use scaling to 1% in the properties panel a lot when I want to make things invisible…

Or create a custom playing technique that looks like a fermata and input that technique on just the staves you want to show the fermata on.

There are also defaults for how many fermatas to show per staff in multiple-voice contexts in Engraving Options > Holds and Pauses.