Hide clef, key and time signature at start of flow

Dorico
#1

I’m sorry to ask this as I’m sure this must have been answered before, but I was unsuccessful with a forum/Google search, so here goes: Can I hide the clef, key signature and time signature at the start of a flow? (Other than painting a white rectangle over it in Acrobat?)

Why do I want to do this (in case this problem can be solved differently)?

I have a piece that is played D.C. with a little variation on the repeat: A four-bar section is replaced with a five-bar section (with different chord changes). So (I suppose) this can’t be done using Ossias. My next attempt was to fake an Ossia by creating a new flow with the five different bars, add a new music frame at the relevant position on the page, scale that “fake ossia” to 75 % and align the bars with the to-be-replaced bars, all of which worked beautifully – except for the fact that I get another reminder that this piece is in 3/4 and D major where I don’t need it.

I’ve tried changing the color of the key signature (etc.) to make it invisible, but that didn’t make any difference (and of course the objects would still take up space if it did, so the system would extend unnecessarily to the left).

Is there a way to do this, other than copying/pasting the entire piece instead of a repeat?

#2

You can input an invisible clef by entering “invisible” into the clefs popover (Shift-C).

To hide the key signature you could input an “atonal” key signature (Shift-K) and hide any unnecessary accidentals that then appear on individual notes.

You can hide the time signature by selecting it and activating “Hide time signature” in the Properties panel.

#3

Thanks Lillie,

that was perfect! The only additional thing I had to do was to fake the bass clef notes into the invisible (treble) clef range because there is no invisible bass clef :slight_smile:

#4

Could you just use a Coda to indent the middle system, and use manual adjust LV ties to fake the ties from 15 to 16. A System Break will let you set the Staff size.

#5

Alternatively, you could create an ossia grand staff, enter open meter as individual meter in the ossia staves, create a 15:12q tuplet, enter the music and set barlines manually in the ossia staves. The result will look like that:

open meter ossia.png
open meter ossia.png1306×554 24.5 KB

I often use tuplets in order to create ossias that contain more or less bars than the main staff does. This has one big advantage: You don’t need to care about layout, note spacing etc. It’s all done automatically.

#6

Then make one! If you aren’t using the octave transposing bass clef (which is just visual in Dorico, it doesn’t actually transpose) elsewhere in the piece, just edit it to be blank and use that instead. You can find it under Engrave/Music Symbols/Clefs. Just delete it so that clef is nothing.

Turn this:

Into this: