Hide specific empty staves, but not all

Working on a concerto full score…I don’t want to hide empty staves except for a lengthy cadenza. In that place only, I’d like to hide empty staves for about 24 bars to save pages, then return to showing all staves, whether empty or not. Is this possible? Thanks!

Tricky one. You’ll have to cheat it. I suspect the easiest way might be to use three (or possibly four) separate flows for the movement.
Flow 1 includes all players and comprises the music that precedes the cadenza.
Flow 2 is the cadenza. It is only assigned to the solo instrument and thus only appears in the full score and the soloist’s part.
Flow 3 includes all players and comprises the music that follows the cadenza.

You’d need a fourth flow if you wanted to cue the cadenza in to the orchestral parts, and that would include all relevant players apart from the soloist. You’d then need a dummy soloist player that only appears in this flow and doesn’t appear in the soloist’s part or the score, and you’d copy and paste the cadenza into this dummy player in order to have something to cue from.

Then you’d need to implement some bar number changes, possibly change the index of the rehearsal marks in Flows 2 and 3, not to mention allowing flows to start partway down a page (Layout Options > Staves and Systems).

The alternative is to hide staves throughout the score, and then add empty text at the start of each stave that you need to show. That requires less thought but breaks multi-rests in the parts, so it’s probably not a good idea.

EDIT: actually, it might be possible to do this with filters in the frame chain. I’ve never actually tried this, but the thought process is as follows:
Set staves to appear throughout the score (in Layout Options).
When you get to the 24 bars of solo line, go into Engrave mode, turn on the Frames switch in the left panel, then grab the filter at the top of the music frame and untick all the players apart from the soloist. Does that work?
FURTHER EDIT: Nope, doesn’t work. You’d still need an extra flow here.

Apart form the cues issue, I think pianoleo is right. 3 flows. Opening material, cadenza, closing material. This is one of the current limitations of Dorico that I sincerely hope will be remedied in the final 2. update.

I had to cheat the opposite way today due to the opposite issue: I want all empty staves to be hidden except for one 4 bar excerpt. (from a formatting perspective it makes sense for one part to not disappear for only 4 measures in the middle of this score)

I had to add a whole note into a second voice and then change it’s size to 1% to get it to disappear but still make Dorico think there is music to be rendered on that line. Oddly, even adding explicit bar rests and adding rests with force duration on still didn’t trick it into displaying that line. I was hoping that in the absence of an implied rest it might display.

Romanos, rather than adding a note in a second voice you can add Shift-X text where you need a stave to appear. Just adding a single empty space (“ “) ought to do the trick.

I recently noticed that if I invoke the text popover and press escape without entering anything, it creates a text signpost.

Interesting… a seemingly better way to do it. (Although I wouldn’t be surprised if this behavior is fixed in a future update.)

“It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” :laughing:

As Dorico pretends to be a professional application, I would appreciate very much if the team will consider to change this behavior, as AUTOMATC solution would NEVER satisfy all users with such different needs and situations…I use empty staves also in order to fill a page, because two orchestral systems sometimes doesn’t fit into one page…But I do not need it in every page…Hm

I have absolutely no doubt they will provide more granular control in the future. The question is simply, “when?”.

I frequently use Flows for ‘movement’ of large-scale works, each of which starts a new page, has a title, and is a complete ‘restart’. Unless I’m missing something, using Flows as a means of hiding stave within one of these movements, is fraught with difficulty.

Every time I’ve tried to use Filters (which have to be in a separate Flow from the MA flow), I just get in a big old mess of duplicate material and the wrong pages with over-rides!

Count me in as someone who wants to have empty staves sometimes for some Players at the same time as wanting to hide other Players, while keeping them in the flow…!

Agreed. This would be a very helpful feature!

I’m baffled trying to figure out how best to format score and parts for a duo cadenza (but could be any cadenza where I only want soloist(s) on a page. I’ve done a lot of searching hoping to avoid asking (because I’m still learning), but…

This is an orchestral score for a concerto, and I want one page with only two players (soloist and one percussion player). Their “cadenza” is 14 bars or so.

  1. The approach of hiding all staves and forcing them to appear by adding text seems awkward and problematic (measure rests, etc.)

  2. I split the (1st) movement into two flows, created a new flow for cadenza, added frames for that on the one score page (LE), changed bar numbers for cadenza and continuation of the movement, and that is looking good. But then I’m getting lost quickly…

  • the system following cadenza is indented with full staff names. I read about forcing system break and then using abbreviated names, but can’t select anything in Engrave mode, so don’t understand how to do that.
  • the following flows for movements 2 and 3 are now number 3 and 4 since the second flow is the rest of movement 1.
    -seems I need to add frames for cadenza in every part…?

I hope there is an easier way for formatting around a cadenza that I just am not finding.

I think using a second flow for the cadenza is very likely to be more trouble than it’s worth, so a solution that uses hidden staves is surely going to be preferable. Hopefully you can generally find a place to add the necessary text item to force a staff to be shown without breaking multi-bar rests.

Many thanks, Daniel! I’ll proceed with that approach.