I’ve read all of the threads about hiding rests and I am not able to make sense of this feature in my use case. I apologize for taking up space, but I thank you in advance for expelling this yet again.
I have a piece of vocal music with several verses. There is one verse that starts on a pick-up. I enter the pickup note in Voice 2, and Dorico populates the rest of the bar with rests, as expected. I made the single note in Voice 2 cue-sized. I want to hide all of the other rests in Voice 2 in the measure, including the eighth-note rest immediately preceding my note, and have the rests from Voice 1 appear completely normal.
Is there another way to enter this type of information that I’m not aware of?
We Shall Overcome.dorico.zip (652 KB)
All you need to do is go to Write mode (not Engrave mode), select the rests you don’t want, then Edit / Remove Rests.
Then, you might want to change the vertical position of the rests, so the full size quarter rest is in its “normal” place and the small 8th rest is lower down. Open the properties panel at the bottom of the window, select a rest, click on “Rest pos” and adjust the number (which is the number of spaces, counting from the middle of the staff). When you do this, the “Force position and duration” option will also be selected automatically.
If you have found some documentation or tutorials about using the “starts voice” and “ends voice” properties, those date back to early versions of Dorico before “Remove Rests” existed.
“Remove rests” actually works by setting the “starts voice” and “ends voice” properties on the correct notes (or even on other rests) automatically. You only need to use “starts voice” and “ends voice” manually in a few rare situations where “Remove Rests” can’t figure out what to do.
Incidentally, you created a new voice every time you wanted to add an extra note. That doesn’'t really matter in a one-page lead sheet, but in a bigger score you don’t want to create hundreds of new voices. It is better to re-use the old ones. Don’t press Shift-V to create a new voice every time, press V to cycle through the existing voices. The icon at the bottom of the note entry caret shows you which voice is active.
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer this so clearly! I really appreciate it, and I imagine others will too.