I am very new to Dorico 6 Pro, coming from many years of Finale. I was, originally, an “old school” pen & ink music prep. person and learned my original craft in pen & ink from Clint Roemer’s (Stan Kenton’s long-time music prep. service in Los Angeles CA, USA) wonderful manual on how to properly copy in the commercial, big band, jazz style. I was able to adapt Finale to fit the 4 bars per line (standard for LA Union copyists) on individual players parts, easily, using “Fit Measures” setting it to 4 bars per line. You hit Control M and filled in the form and select 4 measures per line and filled in measure number region.
I am sure there has to be something in Dorico 6 that does this same thing when extracting and editing the individual player’s parts (usually around 17 on a big band chart.)
Thanks so much for your help, again, in my move to Dorico.
Denny Seifried
You can set the number of measures per system, and systems per page, in Layout Options > Staves & Systems > Casting Off.
If you need to modify any individual systems/page, you can use System or Frame Breaks to force more or less on.
You’ll find that you can achieve a lot more layout just by configuring options than by manually moving stuff around, compared to Finale.
There’s no mechanism for extracting parts in Dorico – in the sense of saving each layout as a separate document on disk. The great thing about Dorico is that you can make as many different layouts from the same music, within one document, as you like.
(And indeed, Finale had Linked Parts for many years, though they weren’t nearly as powerful/flexible as Dorico’s layouts.)
Benwiggy, thank you so much for the great suggestion, it works great. My part I was converting from handwritten pencil, to Dorico is looking great. If you worked in Finale, and were doing 4 measures/line, and needed to go three measures or five measures for a couple of lines, you had to go in and open up fit measures and readjust Finale and put in a new measure number to get back into 4 meas./line. I left out a measure in my Dorico part, and I just added 1 extra measure and Dorico made my adjustment needed to get back to 4 bars/line, automatically!
When you copy big band or commercial music in the USA, we are basically dealing in 4 and 8 bar phases; so, is great to have your rehearsal numbers/letters line up on the first measure of a line, when inserted.
The more I work in Dorico, the better I feel about making the transition from Finale. I had 28 years in Finale; so, and am 83 years old, thus the challenge!
Thank you!
Denny Seifried
Springfield, Ohio, USA