I have just inputted an hour long choral work for Baritone solo, mixed chorus and large orchestra. The full score also includes the piano reduction at the bottom of each page.
Using Sibelius I imagined that it would be easy to extract a Vocal Score from the full score.
How wrong I was. It has been nothing short of a nightmare and has taken a ridiculous amount of time to sort out.
Having specified the staves I wanted in the Vocal Score, I found that the part was a total mess,virtually unreadable at times, such as this page picked more or less at random as there were very few that could pass without editing and respacing and re-optimising…
It has prompted me to make the following suggestions that might at some point be implemented in Dorico.
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The ability to auto hide all systems in which the soloist(s) is/are not singing.
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The ability to auto-hide all systems in which the chorus is not singing, with the proviso that all four choral voices must be present if one or more of them is silent for that system.
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The ability to auto optimise the spacing of the whole score before editing begins.
Obviously the result will not be perfect, but it will be a damned sight better than what Sibelius can achieve at the moment.