I’ve found a couple of threads about pagination and spacing, but nothing is helping this problem. I have a voice/piano score where I am hiding the vocal line when there is nothing on it for multiple measures and lines. When I do this on the first verse on page 5, everything works lovely. When I do this on the second verse on page 9, the Dorico auto spacing screws it up and puts in a ton of space between the vocal line and the piano line in the first staff of the page. If I try to manually move the staves together, the first staff from page 10 never comes over to the bottom of page 9, even though there’s PLENTY of space for it. Can someone tell me what I should do to override this? Or is this just an annoyance I have to live with?
Hi !
Don’t move anything manually… You can reset the staff spacing in Engrave mode Engrave menu, or select the red handles in Staff spacing sub-mode and delete. (I am talking about the piano in the first system of page 9)
This should be solved using Layout options >minimal spacings and vertical justification.
You probably should also give your singer a vocal instrument and not a piano (Setup mode, player’s instrument menu>Change instrument…)
You probably should not use the Staff visibility tool for this, as Layout options >Vertical spacing >Staff visibility does that automatically. It will reduce the risk of hiding some not-empty bars. And try and use as many automated tools as possible. You won’t need to insert breaks for this, so your music will keep floating if you need to perform changes.
Thanks for the help! So far, though, I’m not understanding what you mean about red handles. How do I get those? I only see those if I’ve moved things around manually. The screen shot with all the space in there is what Dorico does on its own. If I move those around, then Iget the red handles.
I also looked at Layout options and tried making changes on the minimal gaps page as well as the vertical justification–nothing changed anywhere on the score.
If I don’t use the Staff visibility too, is there another option to hide empty bars? I tried using the Layout Options→Vertical Spacing→Staff Visibility settings, but again–nothing changed on the entire score.
Layout options are layout -dependant. When you open them, you need to select on the list on the right side of the options the targeted layout. Staff visibility works perfectly, as far as I have experienced it (for over eight years now)
I’m sorry I didn’t open your file, I am away from the computer right now
I did find that the “empty bars” actually had whole rests in them. When I removed the whole rests and the default “empty bar whole rest” was in them, the Staff Visibility options started working. Unfortunately, that page 9 spacing still happened when I hid the line.
As a note–I often put a vocal line in a “piano” instrument because I play these back as MIDI on a Yamaha Clavinova. If I use voice as the instrument, that line doesn’t sound right on the Yamaha–more like a Gamelan Piano instead of piano–really weird sound. For this score, which I’ll actually want to print and transpose for a student, I put it in Voice just to see if this would have any effect on the spacing. Not so much.
Any other options for that page 9? All thoughts appreciated!
The frame on p.9 is just over 60% full, so Dorico applies the first rule – adding space between systems and between staves within a system. Since you never want this to happen – you want your voice staff to maintain a consistent distance from the piano staves – try changing the second setting to 60%. That tells Dorico that for any page over 60% full, you do want justification, but you only want Dorico to add space between systems, not in between staves.
So interestingly I was able to get the auto hide from Staff Visibility options to work after I made sure all the whole rests were really empty bars. There was one more I missed and it was throwing it all off. I did then change a little of the spacing between staves in the gap settings and things all fit nicely and legibly on 10 pages instead of 13.
I did switch it over to a ‘Voice’ instrument after trying to get this figured out. In general, I do this because I also export to MIDI for a Yamaha Clavinova piano. When any instrument other than piano is exported, the Yamaha sounds really weird for that instrument. It sounds like a piano-theremin hybrid. For this purpose, I did move it over to ‘Voice’ so I could play with layout better and print out the transposition for students. I kept another identical file with two piano instruments for MIDI export. (Basically one printable and one playable.) I found this happened with Finale and MuseScore, too. So it’s definitely a Yamaha weirdness more than anything Dorico does.
If I want to have the “voice” sound on the Yamaha, yes. But I prefer to have the piano sound for the voice line when playing. When using the voice instrument in MIDI export, that’s where the piano ends up sounding very strange.
