Hi,
I’m an aural skills teacher in the music department at the college/university level.
I have been using Sibelius to create blank template worksheets to hand out to students for weekly “dictation quizzes.”
In Sibelius, I would simply compose my melodies and print the completed page of melodies as my answer key. Then I would simply choose “select all” - “Hide” and boom, magic, all the notes and rests would be hidden, leaving me with a perfectly gorgeous, formatted, blank version to give to my students. Time signatures, key signatures and barlines would be left behind, and the best part is that, by having the notes hidden, the relative widths of the bars was already adjusted accordingly based on the density of the music contained (a bar containing eight 8th notes would be wider than one containing two half notes, for example). I liked this because it made my students’ process neater to have sufficient space in the bars for their hand writing.
Best of all, it took literally two keystrokes to accomplish.
I’m struggling to find a similar way (well, ANY way whatsoever) to make a blank worksheet like this. I need staves with barlines, and no rests within.
Yes, I know there is a way to toggle empty to bars to appear empty, and not have whole rests in them. Not a good solution. I make worksheets of all kinds, and perhaps there are sections in my worksheet where I WANT a whole rest to appear. Having to change a global setting that affects the whole score is not a good solution. Also, I’m really looking to have the template laid out with the bars of relative sizes (not uniform empty bars), so that there is more room for the student to fill in the necessary density of musical material into the template.
Thanks for sharing. Some cool concepts here, but nothing that pertains to my needs.
Also, these were made with Dorico 2, and the framework and locations of many of the menus shown here does not line up with the current version.
Select the notes and rests, then in Properties select Color and set the Alpha channel to 0. This will hide the noteheads. With the notes selected, in Engrave click Hide Stem and Hide Ledger Lines. This effectively hides the notes, but they will still play back, and the spacing is maintained. The catch IIRC is there’s not any good way to hide dots, so if you have dotted notation, you have to change it or you’re out of luck.
I actually usually end up using Slash Notation here, but modified to effectively be “Blank Notation.” I don’t ever use Small Slashes so I modified my Small Slash Notehead Set to be blank. Apply Slash Notation to a region, then click the Small Slash property and everything is hidden but will still play back correctly. The catch with this is the horizontal spacing now reflects the spacing for slash notation and not your underlying music. This is really fast and easy though.
Neither workaround is perfect so pick and choose what might work best for you.
Hmmm. I think I could live with this solution.
Change dotted rhythms as necessary.
Thanks!
Does anybody from Dorico follow these threads?
I know Dorico likes to be “different” but in Finale, Sibelius, MuseScore, is super-duper easy to hide things and useful in many settings.
