This is a feature request, but I’m open to other ways to accomplish it.
In the example below, my players struggle to follow a slow 7/4 (and admittedly, I struggle to conduct it cleanly). They’re greatly helped by dashed barlines, which I added after the fact… they show the division of the bar but don’t change the bar numbering:
The problem is that the added dashed barline breaks the multi-bar rests in other parts.
Is there an easy way around this? If not, I’d like to request a way to add some sort of dashed barlines that won’t show up in empty bars. Thanks!
This is something I’ve wanted too. You can get close by entering “4/4|3/4” into the metre popover. This will display the time signature as “4/4 + 3/4” and add dashed barlines that don’t break multirests (the only appear in nonempty measures). But there’s no way to make the time signature appear as 7/4. Your problem could be solved by adding an option to display “4/4 + 3/4” as “7/4”.
Here’s a relevant excerpt from Gould’s Behind Bars, pg. 178:
In addition to the dashed barlines, I would like a native solution to display the beat division shown at the bottom of the page. I know the (3+2)/4 is possible in Dorico, but I would like an option to keep the time signature as 5/4 and have 3+2 shown above in the same font as the time signature, linked to and controlled by the time signature itself. Something like “show beat group above staff” in the properties panel.
Both of these would make hybrid metres so much easier to work with.
Dashed barlines also break/mess with interchanging meters when Dorico rewrites them after a bar is deleted before them, (4/4+3/8 with dashed barlines between them have the tendency to move the dashed barlines to the start of the interchanging meter double-bar)
