I am trying to create some stick notation - that’s stems and beams, but no noteheads. I’ve managed to do that by recolouring the notes in white and changing them all to the same pitch. [Pitch is notated with solfa lettering.]
I can’t work out how to hide the staff, key signature, clef, brackets, etc., so I’m just left with the time signature, headless notes, barlines and the text-based elements. Can you help please?
This is the closest I could get. This is an unpitched, one-line instrument (in this case a Snare drum), with lyrics attached. There’s a “null” clef you can use, key signatures don’t show up in unpitched instruments anyway. Then create a new Notehead Set from the Engrave menu, in which the only symbol it uses is empty. The staff line thickness can be set to 0 in Engraving Options>Staves, but as you can see, you can’t get rid of the 1-pixel hairline except maybe by using an external SVG editor. Of course, the melodic information is contained in the lyrics only and Dorico has no clue about which notes those represent, so you can forget about playback or higher-level operations like transposition.
If you open the attached file directly in Dorico (don’t import it into an existing project) you’ll have a stave with 0 staff lines. The player can be duplicated and its instrument can be dragged to another player if you wish, but you’d need to build your project around it. It’s technically a pitched stave bit you could always assign a percussion patch to it if you wanted it to sound unpitched.
0line.musicxml.zip (2.23 KB)
Thanks to both of you, that’s also one of my fields of work and I like hrnbouma’s solution.
Love Somebody.zip (51 KB)
Thanks to both of you for your suggestions. I tried pianoleo’s file - the results are attached.
I’d love to make the barlines a bit longer, and when inputting the notes to get stems up they appear red as they’re too low for flute (which is a bit irritating but not insurmountable).
The only thing I didn’t do was make the noteheads disappear - but I discovered I can do that by colouring them white. I’ll explore hrnbouma’s suggestion on that too as it may be simpler in the long run.
On this kind of file I’m not concerned with playback - there’s nothing that complicated!
I’ll soon have a really thorough template - thanks again.
In Engraving Options > Barlines, look for the barlines protrude setting. I’m not in front of Dorico right now but there’s definitely an option in there that I often set to roughly 3.5 spaces when I’m working without staff lines.
Thanks too for the barline suggestion. 2.5 spaces was better for me to avoid getting too close to the lyrics. I now have the template for lots more songs.
Interested to know how you created the 0line XML file. Was it from another programme?