Hi, I have been working on a chamber piece, and have needed to use a separate cue staff for certain measures in the part scores. I accomplished this using ossias as per a previous thread with text elements to denote the instrument (Fl., Vln etc) - it looks good, and I found it fairly quick to work with after some initial setup. But this approach has the drawback that I have to copy music into the ossia, and it won’t update automatically if I change the music in the full score.
Ideally there would be a specific feature in Dorico for creating cue staffs (hence the feature request tag).
I was also wondering if cutaways might be a way to implement this. I’m thinking that the user could add the cue Player to the target part Layout, change the staff size, and then create manual cutaway regions. However, from what I can tell, cutaways will always show the staff if there are notes present - there is no way to hide a cutaway in a certain region unless there are rests. Am I correct about this? If so, is it possible this capability could be added as an option at some point? (Another feature request.)
The user would also need to manually hide certain elements in the local part Layout (e.g. it would be common to hide playing techniques, articulations, slurs etc from cues). Whereas a proper cue staff feature could have the same options for hiding/showing elements as Dorico’s existing cue feature.
Another approach I have seen suggested is (similar to the above): add the cue Player to the target part Layout, change the staff size, then use Manual Staff Visibility changes to show the cue staff where needed. The problem with this is that Manual Staff Visibility changes are always accompanied by System Breaks, which makes this solution not really workable. (Unless I have misunderstood something.) So I suppose another potential improvement would be to allow Manual Staff Visibility changes to occur without System Breaks - similar to how cutaways and ossias can appear/disappear at any region within a system.
No, this is not correct. You can test it yourself by selecting a spot with notes where you’d like to create a cutaway and right-clicking and choosing Staff > Create Start Cutaway.
You can create manual cutaways, and these can hide the staff even if notes are present; however, you can’t have both cutaways and multi-bar rests in the same layout, so this approach might not be ideal for parts.
I use the ossia approach often for cue staves, using Dorico’s dynamically-updating Cues feature. The only extra step is scaling the cue up to normal size in engrave mode, since cue-size notes are too small if the ossia staff is already cue-sized.
I was just trying this – how do you get the cue notes to scale up? I can’t seem to manage it in either Write or Engrave. NVM, see below. And are you also able to hide the measure rests in the ossia staves?
Oh, thanks, of course. But then I guess the assumption is that if you’re using cue staves, you’re not also going to be using actual cues in the main staves, since they would also be larger.
Actually, you can scale the cue notes directly in Engrave mode – I was just trying to grab the wrong thing (trying to grab the cue instead of the notes themselves).
Even Locally will scale the original notes in the same layout, so you’d need to do all of this cue work directly in the part, or in a separate full score. (I usually add cues in the full score, where I can see everything.
You can turn off the option to put bar rests in all cues, and then put in explicit bar rests in the normal-staff cues.
Yes, drag select the cue notes in engrave mode, then scale to normal. One weird side effect of this I’ve noticed, however is that you can’t have 2 differently-scaled cues from the same source material. If you scale a cue to normal, any other cues of the same material (in other players, for instance) will also be scaled up (regardless of global vs. local properties scope) so that’s something to watch out for.
Still, to return to the OP, it might be nice if a cue object had a property to “Display as cue staff”. So you would add a cue in the normal way, and then when you activate this property, the cue flips up into an ossia stave with the proper note scaling and hidden rests.
I hadn’t thought of creating a cue in the ossia staff. That makes sense, and seems more elegant than my previous approach (copying the source material into the ossia).
To summarize, this is the process as I understand it:
Engraving Options > Staves > Ossia scale factor - change this to 3/4 (if you are following the Behind Bars guideline)
Library > Paragraph Styles > Cue Labels - set Size to Absolute instead of Staff-relative
In the target part Layout, create ossia staff for the desired region.
Add a cue on that ossia staff.
The cue contents will have been scaled down twice - once as per the cue settings, and once as per the ossia settings. So we need to scale them up.
In Engrave mode, click and drag to select the cue contents
In properties, ensure “Set local properties” is set to “Locally”, then change the Scale to Normal. This will scale the contents to the normal size for ossias, which we have set to 3/4 (same as cues).
Either remove the ossia rests explicitly (Edit > Remove Rests, while in Write mode) or turn off the option to put bar rests in all cues, and put in explicit bar rests in the normal-staff cues.
Note that any new elements added to the source region after this point will also need to be scaled up in the part Layout.
As for a proper baked-in solution, I agree that adding a “display as cue staff” property to cues could be an ideal way to implement this.
I think Remove Rests can only be used in write mode - maybe you were trying in Engrave mode?
Good point about the cue label - that is unfortunate. I guess we would have to hide the cue label via the “Hide” property and then add a custom text element.
