@cparmerlee thanks a lot and yes! Only comments about your first text is that the drummers I know, with the music my band is playing, read the parts very carefully…and I don’t have to convince them There are many things to handle in my arrangements/compositions (and others as well in the styles). Yes I hope that the support for drum notation in Dorico is reinforced, since as we know this is the most time consuming task in the editing of an arrangement/composition. This was for me the most important factor for starting to consider to leave Finale after so many intense years. Unfortunately, as of now Dorico does not give more support. But again, I hope that will change soon.
And yes again! I fully agree with your other ideas about “multimeasure play”. I should have the possibility to select which measures that should be included in a particular “Play X” bar, and I guess it would be fine if it still would play back (however I don’t care so much about drum playback honestly, but for others I guess the option should be there).
My drummers would look at the parts more if it were easier for me to educe the routine parts to “Play time 7 bars”. For good drummers, less detail in the chart is better – just show them the bits that are not routine.
Cparmerlee, I’ve used your method for decades (since long before computers put in an appearance.) The only difference is that I word it “7 bars time,” on the advice of a pro jazz drummer. He said that the word “play” is unnecessary and slows the eye down, and that the number of bars is the first thing he wants to see.
I really wish it were easy to do this (and keep the underlying notes there for playback). If I could easily make that marking, that would easily cover 80% of the measures in most of my charts. The drummers would really appreciate that because they don’t need me to show them how to play a samba pattern.
@gdball I completely agree that drum cues MUST have the ability to have articulation set. As a drummer in a big band setting, I would provide setups differently for capped accents versus standard notes.
Thanks to the OP for the post; it’s a good summary.
Hi @jesele and @FredGUnn, I have now worked a little more on your proposal for achieving “multimeasure play” I made it work reasonbly well as per your proposal, but a question is how this can be repeated easier? It takes a while setting the font size, the enclosure & erase background, line thickness and the right L/R/T/B paddings. Ok I made it look fairly ok in one place, and I want to proceed to the next - I might have perhaps 10 such areas in a chart, sometimes more, sometimes less. When I copy the whole “play X” thing to use it in another place, only the text follows. The font size goes back to default, and the enclosure disappears and reapply requires all the steps again for the other properties. Any ideas? Thanks //D
It sounds as though you’re double clicking on the text object in order to edit it, then copying and pasting just the text.
If you grab the object itself and Alt-click it it should copy and paste just fine, complete with its properties.
@jesele thank you for this; great that I now learned a bit more about paragraph styles (still a beginner, and haven’t covered everything yet). This could work very well, however I have a follow-up question - I can’t find an “erase background” (or something similar) setting here. I tried to set the background color to white but it appears to only cover the text; not the full box:
Hi again @pianoleo . Sorry about having to ask another question about this functionality…if I do as per the video (I saw it also in another thread) and set the “H-bar width delta” to e. g. -100 most of the times the multimeasure rest shows up on the next page. Is there any trick to prevent that?
It was ok to via trial and error find good “H-bar width delta” values for the first page of the drum part, I could make them end up in the gap between page 1 and 2 in engrave mode. Took a while but it was worth it. Now I go for page 2, and here a new problem arises…I tried to get the multimeasure rest between page 2 and 3 but then it turns up on both pages…
Dan, I mostly don’t create multi-bar rests when I print out scores for my musicians friends. Let say I’ve 15 bars multibar-rest, what I do, is make one empty bar, then hide the whole-note rest, then draw my customized bar rest, then I add text above. That’s all. What’s important for me is the printout, this is to over-ride the limitations of the music notation softwares.
There are many things to handle in my arrangements/compositions (and others as well in the styles). Yes I hope that the support for drum notation in Dorico is reinforced, since as we know this is the most time consuming task in the editing of an arrangement/composition. This was for me the most important factor for starting to consider to leave Finale after so many intense years. Unfortunately, as of now Dorico does not give more support. But again, I hope that will change soon.
