Hi, I’ve recently switched from Finale to Dorico. Right now I’m having trouble with displaying rhythmic cues that should hide the rests for the original part. I see there are quite a few topics already asking how to do this, but none of their solutions work for me as they involve global properties while I want the score to have no cues.
Particularly the Trumpet 2 rhythm is very difficult to count without the rhythmic context from the other part, but having all these cues on the score adds a ton of unnecessary clutter (the entire ensemble is playing some version of these rhythms) so I don’t want to show them there.
I’m not using the built-in cues because, as you can see, it doesn’t help with counting at all due to the cue rhythms being on their own independent voice. In order to use these cue rests I would need to be able to hide real rests when there are cue notes and hide cue rests when there are real notes. But unless there’s something I’m missing, I’m assuming Dorico’s systems fundamentally would not work with that.
Instead, I am using regular notes with no playback and a custom notehead (I’m surprised there’s no easy way I can find to include unpitched notes for pitched instruments, given that many extended techniques may work that way.)
Adding these custom noteheads is quite time consuming (and I’ve even run into an annoying bug when pasting these into specifically bass instruments that read treble clef) but coming from Finale I’m used to dealing with some jank. However, I cannot figure out a good way to only display these cue notes in the parts and not in the score. The ‘remove rests’ feature is commonly used as the solution for hiding regular rests for cues, but it removes them globally. In Finale, I could accomplish this pretty easily by writing the score version and the part version in different layers and using custom staff styles exclusive to the score or part to only display the correct layer. But I don’t think Dorico has equivalents for all of those systems. So I’m wondering if anybody here would have a better solution for me besides doing a crazy amount of manual work in engraving mode.
(here’s a gif of the bug I mentioned, as I wasn’t able to include multiple attachments in the main post. In this gif I am pressing Alt + Up, but it’s sending the notes down an octave instead. This only happens with bass instruments that read transposing treble clef and specifically with slash noteheads. Also, changing these specific noteheads later to ‘circled noteheads’ caused all the other bass-reading-treble instrument slash notes to drop down 2 octaves, and undo doesn’t fix this. so idk what’s going on with this specific interaction.)
Hello Eric,
welcome to the forum.
I have two suggestions:
Have you tried implementing Dorico’s native cue function and setting the property to “Show as rhythmic cue”? This might be actually more helpful to the players:
Another suggestion; you could beam over the rests in your trumpet parts, that is another way to make it easier to read. Also you could show beams as stemlets:
I write this, because as a player I find your example actually helpful, but difficult to read:
Yes I tried the rhythmic cues. The example screenshot labelled ‘closest I can get with built in cues’ shows what that looks like and I also explained why it doesn’t help (the performer cannot see the exact rhythmic relationship between the parts.)
May be give the beaming over rests a try.
That can actually be more helpful for the player (in your example trumpet 2) than showing the corresponding cues:
You may be right, this is certainly easier to count than no cues but with less visual noise than with them, and also more “traditional“ of a solution. I personally prefer the cues as I feel understanding how the rhythm fits into the full phrase makes it easier to play it as an actual musical passage rather than simply playing notes in time, and actually counting this rhythm from my perspective overcomplicates what is just a simple hocketed hemiola, but I suppose the average performer doesn’t care about any of that and will just be confused by the extra information. I may have to do some polling.
Even with an alternate solution, I am still curious how my original notation would be properly accomplished. I have a clear idea of how I would figure out something of the like in Finale, and it would help me acclimate to Dorico to understand how you’re ‘intended’ to solve these complex non-traditional notation problems.
You could add the rhythmic cues above the system.
If you really want to follow your route from the other prior software, copy trumpet 1, filter for notes and chords, paste to staff below, (while still selected) change the note head type..
This works, if those two instruments only play alternately. If they overlap, you will have to paste into another voice.
I repeat, as a player these cluttered parts, as helpful as they might be intended to be, would drive me crazy..
Well, we had a rehearsal on the piece with the beams over rests notation and predictably, nobody besides the percussionists could play the right rhythm. While the ‘ghost notes’ look scary and confusing at a glance, I feel they would lead to a proper understanding of how to play (and more importantly ‘feel’) the rhythm correctly after a brief bit of rehearsal. While the more standard notation is always tricky to count, no matter how familiar it is. I know how the piece is supposed to go but when I try to read the rhythm without the ‘ghost notes’ I can’t do it! …I probably won’t use them anyways, but I’ve yet to be convinced that they aren’t a good idea.
But I don’t really want to bog down what was intended to be a technical question with subjective notation decisions (my mistake for including my intentions in the original post I guess?) I still don’t know how I would include ‘ghost note’ cues in the parts but not in the score. The solution of copying the other part into the staff and changing the noteheads (which is what I did) does not have a decent way that I’ve found to hide those notes in the score.
I’m not sure if this will help to achieve what you want, but in Layout Options > Players > Cues, there is a toggle (Show cues) for whichever layouts are selected in the Layouts list on the right. Maybe enabled for the player layouts and disabled for the score layout?
