Here is a feature request for the new large time signatures feature. Its often requested to have vertical black lines drawn with a sharpy, connecting the large time signatures vertically. They actually added this feature to Overture4 at my request some years ago and called it “hollywood lines”. This would be very useful in Dorico.
That’s interesting: I’ve not seen that in the various film scores I’ve seen. Are there particular conductors who want this appearance?
That only seems to be in handwritten scores where Big time signatures despite their size can be cluttered with other information.
It is not only handwritten. Its how I was taught to do it by a hollywood professional leading a film scoring academy. Most likely this is a conductor preference, some may want it, others may not. As it stands with all score tools aside from Overture, I have to print out the score and then go through every page one by one and draw a black line with a sharpie.
From Overture4:
Those Lines from Overture look really good.
As a workaround, could you place a mega thin text frame with borders switched on between the sigs?
I know it’s not immediate and you would have to do it for each page but it would print out fine…
If have to do it manually it’s probably easier to grab a sharpie and a straight edge right before the session and draw them on there. I am new to Dorico and just learning it so I will have a look at your workaround at some point
From a conductor perspective the most important thing they need to be able to see in the heat of battle as the click track is rolling is the meter changes and bar lines. The actual notes are secondary. Thr will of course preview the notes before recording and communicate with the players about it, and also they will look at the notes and symbols a bit higher level, for example they see a quiet slow passage and conduct appropriately, or a run of fast notes in a creacendo or whatever. While the click track is running they aren’t that interested in every single note and symbol. In a film score the meter is often changing all over the place and they are watching a video monitor with streamers and other visual cues while trying to ensure they hit all the important hit points with those meter changes happening mostly to accommodate that. So the big fonts and lines really help them. Usually they want exactly four bars per system also. Consistently.
Dorico already has a Casting Off feature for putting x number of bars on a system, consistently.