Condensing roadblocks

Hi all,

what would be the best way of working around this (the Clarinet’s rests position in bar 169):

It is a tricky bar, but the rests sure can’t stay where they are now.
Playing nice with the feature – use two staves?
Hide this staff for this system and show another one, writing both clarinet parts manually on to one staff?
Other suggestions?

I think I would probably be tempted to use two staves for this system for the time being.

We know that it’s important that rests have editable positions in condensed music, and this is something we plan to address in future.

In a situation like this, I have created a notehead set using the quarter rest and eighth rest as the noteheads for a quarter note and an eighth note. After the notes are entered on the staff, the rest noteheads are selected and the stems hidden in engrave mode. Playback of these notes should be suppressed.

Edit: To have the rests appear at the correct vertical positions in both the score and the part, create two-note chords using the rest noteheads. In the part with the property scope set to locally, hide the rests for the score by setting their custom scale to 1. Then hide the rests for the part in the score. If the rests in the score are outside the staff, the ledger lines can be hidden in engrave mode.

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Thanks, very well thought out! I will try this.


“Rests” hidden with opacity set to zero, leger lines to -1/2 for both left and right, stems hidden. I guess a script of some kind would be useful if one needs to do a lot of these.

@dspreadbury Thanks Daniel. And this would be done with manual condensing? I have tried to use Limit pitch crossing with a maximum number of zero, but that does not seem to change anything here.

Yes, you could use a condensing change to specify that this condensing group should not condense for this passage.

Although it is fine to hide the “rests” by setting their opacity to zero, you will probably need to print or export to PDF in color to keep these items hidden. And instead of adjusting the lengths of ledger lines, you could use the property “Hide ledger lines” in engrave mode.

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Sorry for continuing with this, but I simply cannot understand it. See this:


Why are the results in bar 3 and 7 different? Bar 7 is fine, but the notation in bar 3 does not make sense.

Factory settings for notation options for condensing.
Is there any way I can avoid the notation in bar 3, other than manual condensing?
Minimal example attached.
test 0806.dorico (491.8 KB)

Why are the results in bars 3 and 7 different? Because at the end of the phrase before bar 3, both bassoons are playing and sharing a stem, but at the end of the last phrase before bar 7, the bassoons are not sharing a stem. If you add a condensing change at the start of bar 6, select the bassoon pair in the left column and click OK, the quarter notes in bar 6 will share a stem and bar 7 will look like bar 3, which is just the opposite of what you want.

Although you could add a half rest to the notehead set “Paustecken” and use it at the start of bar 3 for the first bassoon, I think that adding a manual condensing change to force the bassoons to use different voices would be easier. Of course, you have to remember to reset the manual condensing later.

Yes, I think I understand your reasoning, but bar 5 is a new phrase – why would the end of the previous phrase influence it?

But more important: I still don’t understand the division of rests in bar 3. If I delete the two first bars, it will look like this –

Why not a bar rest in the original example?

Of course I have already solved this in my score using manual condensing, but I am a bit disturbed by not fully understanding.

Like you, I wish that the way one condensed phrase ends would not influence how the next phrase begins. Apparently, if a phrase ends with both instruments playing and sharing a voice, then Dorico wants both instruments to share rests for as long as possible, even if the next phrase does not begin at the start of a bar. If this behavior is not a bug, I think it is an undesirable feature.

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