Dorico team: I would love to be able to hide slash regions while keeping chord symbols above the bars and any hidden music underneath that plays back.
EDIT: Another possibility is a “blank notation” or “empty bar” region, as mentioned by @FredGUnn below. Ideally, this region could contain underlying music that would play back, like a slash region.
Why?
For improvised solo sections of jazz charts, chord slashes are of course the convention, and IMO Dorico’s slash regions are brilliantly implemented.
That said, empty bars would provide space for musicians to pencil in spontaneous ideas during rehearsals and recording sessions.
As I prepared charts for a recording session a few years ago, one of the musicians - a world-renowned performer and producer - asked me to do this. I’d been penciling in ideas in charts many times over the years and always found it annoying to have to work around the slashes. So this immediately made sense. It was a “why didn’t I think of that?” moment.
In Sibelius, where I originally made the charts, it was easy to create empty bars by hiding bar rests, which can be done freely.
Dorico’s restrictions on hiding bar rests have, in some cases, required work-arounds like scaling bar rests or bar repeat regions down to 1 percent to create empty bars. This got the job done - and left me wanting to be able to hide these objects more easily.
But it occurred to me that hiding slash regions would be much more logical because these regions are functionally the same as if the slashes were visible.
While empty bars in solo sections is certainly not common practice in my jazz world, I’ve seen them in a few places, like Chick Corea’s “The Vigil” song book.
Thanks!
