I still have so much trouble figuring out how to work with tokens and spacing on the master pages. I just want to put the title higher on the page and the composer below or to the side. I am aware I am an idiot
These things are hard at first, and do not feel intuitive at all, especially if you’ve never used a DTP app before.
From your picture it seems you are trying to edit the “Default” page template, which is dedicated to all pages which are not the first of the piece. If you apply the “First” page template to the page you are trying to edit, you may get what you are looking for.
Unless you want to have title and composer on every page…
Assuming you do want both the title and composer name to be part of the header on every page, probably the better way to do it is to make the existing text frame a bit taller and edit its content so that it has both the {@flowTitle@} and {@flowComposer@} tokens inside, appropriately formatted. Something like this:
To make everything appear higher on the page, go to the Page Setup page of Layout Options and decrease the top and bottom page margins to taste.
I have fooled with margins in Page Setup and pushed various parameters in various directions. I don’t know what I’m doing LOL. Nothing seems to change, and the composer never shows up either. I feel like there’s some really obvious puzzle piece I’m missing.
the charts:
default page template:
first page template:
Do you see little red triangles in the corners in the Pages panel in Engrave?
If so, then you have page overrides and making changes to the page templates will not update in your score. Right-click and select Remove Page Overrides, and then the changes you’ve made in your templates should appear in your score.
(Both of those are great tunes BTW!)
yes great tunes thank you!!
So, I turned off page overrides (thanks) and this happened. The composer is first and big and it is numbered…I took off the numbers before, and have no idea why the composer is first… 
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Is Laura the first page of your project? If so it’s likely using the “First” template by default. I’m guessing your text frame simply isn’t large enough vertically to show all of your token text at those point sizes without cutting much of it off. If you edit the frame for that page template (in the editor, not as a page override), is there enough room for everything to show properly?
If you want Laura to use the same Default template as Everything Happens to Me, then right click that page in the Pages window, select Insert Page Template Change, and select the correct template.
For the record, no, I couldn’t figure this out. I am going back to the drawing board and making single sheets where I can input to the factory settings that I understand. I was hoping to bundle my repertoire in one project, but now I will simply keep all my songs as separate projects. I have been using Dorico happily for 4 years but cannot format the title, flows, and composers in anything but the “out of the box” manner.