I’ve been struggling with the following concept for a day or two. I’ve been trying different things, reading the manual, scouring the Forum but still can’t manage to do the following.
I’m working on a musical. I have the musical numbers input as separate flows (only one at the moment), but there are places where there is an underscore along with the script. For these musical ideas, I’ve input them as separate flows.
I have nine or ten pages at the beginning for Title page, cast, synopsis, song index and 1st page of script. These pages appear to be independent of Flow 1, because if I uncheck Flow 1 from the Full score, I am left with just these pages. Flow 1 then appears (opening number). After this, there is a musical interlude as the cast vacate the stage (Flow 2) , then there is half a page of script (put in place by Engrave - Insert Page - Insert Text Frame), followed by what should be Flow 3 (a kind of spoken recit)…I can’t get Flow 3 to site correctly. It either appears after Flow 2, or if I create a ‘Music Frame’ after the half page of text, and copy/paste it appears there, but also on the next page?
I have just tried something else which is most bizarre and ended up with what I want. I grabbed the lower handle of the ‘offending’ copy of Flow 3 and simply minimised it and the music no longer shows. It is still there but the minimised frame can’t show it. Surely this will lead to further problems if I construct the score like this? What is the correct way of going about this?
I presume the Dorico team are going to cover things like this in update YouTube videos (or I noticed a live stream being booked for next week?).
Thanks,
Al
If you create music frames on empty pages, they get their own (layout) frame chain… stick with masterpages for the music flows, and insert master page changes as appropriate…
Thanks for the reply. Are ‘Music Frames’ in Engrave solely for things that fit into one frame on a page and don’t extend any further, for example a few bars, rather than a whole section? Should I have created a new flow and pasted / copied anything that extended further than a frame?
In a Layout, by default you have two different “master page formats”, called First and Default. “First” is for the first page of each flow. “Default” is for everything else.
Both “First” and “Default” have a music frame, and those frames are chained together, so you get as many pages as it takes to contain the music in a flow.
If you want a page of text after Flow 2, do the same as you did to create the text pages at the start of the score - create a page with no master formatting and put a text panel on it. You should then find Flow 3 starts automatically on the next page after that.
If you added a _music_frame to a page and put Flow 3 into it, unless you created your own frame chain you will only see as much of flow 3 as will fit on the first page, and the automatic formatting will display Flow 3 again (from the beginning) where it thinks it ought to be.
It’s worth setting up a “toy” project with just a piano and a few bars of music in each flow, while you are finding out what’s going on. If nothing else, things will work quicker than on your real, large project - and if you get in a mess, you can just delete it and start again rather than trying to repair the damage!
Guess what I tried to say above was that if you want to combine text and music on a page in the middle of the flow, and not want to upset/interupt the flow of the music, you can add a master page (e.g. based on the Default,) adjust the music frame to your need, and then change to this master page for that one page only.
I’ve been experimenting more and I’m seeing things a little clearer. What I seem to have discovered is that if you create a page in ‘Engrave - Insert Pages’, within a section of music (numerous Flows) then you cannot delete this page (at least I couldn’t). I had to shuffle it to the end of the last flow (using ‘Swap with next page’). Once it was at the end, then I could delete it.
I think this is also linked to ‘Setup - Page Setup - Flows’ where ‘New Flows…always start new page / Allow on existing page’ only pertains to an actual ‘New Flow’ when it is created…you can’t seem to change this after creating the flow and expect it to shift back to fill empty space on a page. Have you found the same?
I just had to shift a page to the end again and thought I would add this note. When I tried to delete a page from within two existing flows, by highlighting the 'empty page in the ‘Pages’ tab of ‘Engrave’ and right-clicking selecting ‘Remove Page Overides’, it didn’t do anything. Once I had shuffled the empty page to the end of the last flow, using ‘Swap with next page’, once the empty page was at the end I could right click and select ‘Remove Page Overides’ and once the computer had stopped ‘spinning’ it automatically deleted the empty page.
Is including the script text with the music typical in a mainstage musical? I realize some musicals for school productions do this, and certainly you should be able to do whatever you want.
Have you considered setting up a Custom Master Page for your text pages?
Hi Derrek,
I don’t know what the etiquette is for writing a musical, but it seems to me a full score with some of the text featured before the numbers will help the conductor, a spoken cue if nothing else. I don’t plan in including all the text, only where it will help the conductor pull the thing together. As it is, the first production may run from backing tracks, but even so, it will help the sound engineer cue in the right place. Thanks for the Master Page setup. I presume this would be a new Flow, that was just a text flow…is that right?
Oh, yes, I understand needing song cue lines. I was picturing you including full text pages of dialog (which would be tricky to format with Dorico’s current text tools).
I do not think you can create a new flow which would be a text flow. It means that if you mess up with the layout, you have to be careful that the text you want to be between two flows (of musical content) is well between those flows. You can use the subtelties of chaining available (pp 121, 128… in the manual) to make sure of that I think.
I’ve just analysed the project I’m working in and it is as follows:
PAGE Nos
1-10 TEXT ONLY
11-31 FLOW 1
32 FLOW 2
33 - FRAME 1 - TEXT, FRAME 2 (FLOW 3), FRAME 3 (TEXT)
34-52 FLOW 4
If in ‘Setup’ I uncheck any of the FLOWS from appearing in the Full Score layout, it has a drastic effect on the layout. However I’m assembling this score, it looks right. Obviously the songs in a musical have a defined place within the text so I won’t need to re-arrange the order of the flows. The major consideration seems to be the creation of a new Flow at the correct place. ie. don’t create all the Flows at once, then think about text pages and combining them, but create text pages (Engrave - Insert Page) specifically where you need them, then create the Flow. If you don’t do it like this, then I think you then have to shuffle the text pages (Engrave - Swap with Next / Previous Page) to get the desired effect. As I’ve said before, this may not be correct as I’m still trying to figure out how things all combine in Engrave
