I have an issue with repeat bars, and I did not find it in a previous topic. I joined both a picture and a project. There is an unwanted additional barline at bar 33, as well as an additional space at the beginning of bar 15. The two issues might be correlated.
I remarked that adding music in bar 33 made the additional barline disappear.
Needless to say, I haven’t managed to find the source of the problem yet, despite having played around with adding and suppressing bars, changing the type of barline, changing the voices and the start/end voice option, and searching for a hidden item that might cause the problem.
A similar problem has been mentioned two years ago, but it occurred with a time signature and the issue seems still unresolved: Strange Spacing Between Repeated Barlines
I have pounded on this file for several minutes and here’s what I find:
The extra space does not appear in Galley View. It seems to be due to a phantom key signature ( 2♭)
I began deleting things before and after bar 33 to cut it down to a minimal case, and noticed that the marimba staves disappear from the beginning to the first entrance, regardless of the staff visibility setting. I eventually discovered that this is because all 3 of these instruments are held by one player. I tried moving the instruments to 3 separate players and that solved the spacing problem without losing any of the music.
Also, taking the file as it is, if I shorten the tam-tam note in bar 32 to a half note or less (or lengthen it so it ties into bar 33), the unwanted space disappears! I have little experience with multiple percussion instruments in one ‘player’ in Dorico. I don’t see any problem with the separate-player setup since this entire “score” seems to be a part for one person.
If you do not allow for instrument changes, the problems disappear. But why it is like that, I don’t know.
EDIT:
In both cases, shortening the TamTam note to a half note results in the problems disappearing, too. It seems like Dorico is confused, because it starts at the tamtam, goes to the marimba during a held tamtam note, and after the marimba has to go back to the still held tamtam note… this is clearly at the border of the automated instrument-change function. I would refer to manual staff-visibility here.
Ah, of course, thanks, klafkid – The way the feature of multiple instruments for one player is intended to be used is: You write music for only one instrument at a time, and Dorico handles the instrument switching notation automatically. Music for a percussionist playing multiple instruments at once should not use this feature, but just include all the desired instruments in the part.
