For me, this flow is quite an intricate procedure. The two singers will eventually have stemless notes to indicate free rhythm, but the accompaniment needs to stay in common time for a number of bars at a time. So far it’s worked fine. But when I get to the first ‘regroup’ bar (bar 11 here) I can’t give the singer a common time bar’s rest. The Ab in bar 11 is just a dummy, which I created in the hope that deleting it would show a corresponding rest. But, as shown in the video clip, it doesn’t.
I did find a similar question in the forum, to which the solution was to toggle the ‘Starts voice’ switch, but I can’t get that to work in this context. BTW, I’ve worked only up to bar ‘10’ (though I suppose it really should be 13 as far as the accompaniment is concerned - I’ve only just noticed that), and only in one stave (the upper of the two vocal ones), but I had prepared a 16/4 signature in bar ‘12’ in order to continue, when I spotted the missing rest issue.
Try showing the note input caret on that staff, then press Shift-B, enter “rest”, and press Return. That inputs a bar rest in the voice indicated by the caret. I suspect that the starts/ends voice properties have indeed been set somewhere as a consequence of you previously removing rests.
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Oh, it was so great to see that ol’ rest appear! Thanks, Lillie! I have to admit that I had no idea that you could actually input rests in Dorico at all. Another one for my ever-growing cheat sheet.
This may also be a consequence of leaving the “Rest visibility” option on in the MusicXML import page of Preferences.
I’ll certainly take a look at that - another thing I hadn’t learnt about.
[Moments later] Those are very useful options. Thanks.
It’s too late for this project, I imagine, but the point is that there are a load of options in that dialog that are akin to you manually overriding Dorico’s defaults on a local basis. It’s sometimes helpful (or at least, I find it helpful) to understand what the things are that Dorico’s doing by default, what the things are that are consequences of my actions, and what the things are that were (sometimes mistakenly) defined by the MusicXML.
I certainly share your views on this.