In a drum kit, it’s usually best to have bar counts in a slash region.
In pitched instruments (guitar/bass/keys) it’s not really needed if there are chord changes every bar or so. Yes, I use them if I have 4+ bars of the same chord.
Currently, it is only possible to choose slash regions either with or without bar counts by default, with the option of changing individual or multiple regions via the Properties panel.
I’d love a little checkbox (or something) along the lines of “only show bar counts in players with chords when over [4] bars”.
Hopefully that makes sense!
I don’t know if it’s an option for you, but generally players hate the “wall of slashes” look, so I try to use 1-bar repeats as it makes the structure immediately clear. I don’t really like Dorico’s implementation of slash regions either as it makes copying an pasting a single bar completely unreliable so I basically never use slash regions longer than a single bar either.
Score:
Bass:
Drums:
I can copy a bar from the Bass part to another section in the score without having to stop and break a slash region first, and the drummer instantly knows the phrase structure at a single glance without introducing additional horizontal spacing issues.
How do you manage instances where the score has a system or page break in the middle of a stretch of bar repeats?
Just put the count at the end of the system or at logical phrases in the part, even if the 1-bar repeat crosses systems:
I mean, this isn’t really new, this was the standard way that hand copyists handled this for decades:
It would be great if Dorico could be smarter with this between parts and score and actually write it out on the first bar of each score page, or at least each even score page. This has been requested for years though so obviously isn’t so straightforward to implement.
Yes, exactly. I don’t use bar repeats specifically because of this, even though I would in many cases prefer to. It pains me to see a score page that begins with a “%”.
I guess I prioritize the parts as making the parts clear for the player is most important for me. I suppose I could have two drum staves with slightly different formatting – one for the part and one to be included in the score – but that seems like too much effort most of the time.
Just thinking: are there any possible workarounds here? For example, I wonder if one could put slashes in the score, then hide them in the parts; then, in the parts, use text to create a one-bar repeat and drop it into the middle of the staff/measure, and hide that text in the score; and finally, paste repeatedly into additional measures.
I figure that until Dorico can render this feature properly, there must be some other workaround besides creating additional players.
Something like this:
bar repeats.dorico (1.5 MB)
EDIT: never mind. That’s a disaster. As soon as I add figures above the staff in a different voice, the one-bar repeat text positioning moves all over the place.
