Manual Staff visibility - a question

Is the Manual Staff Visibility function restricted to complete bars?

I have a vocal line with two singers in a question/answer type song. Neither is singing at the same time as the other. However, there are occasions when one vocal line ends at the start of a bar and the other starts at the end of the same bar - those are proving to be problem bars. I’m trying to do it all on one vocal staff using Manual Staff Visibility and Performer tags (She/He) but I’m struggling to get that to work - hence the question.

Could you treat the vocal line as single Player with two instruments?

I think it is even restricted to complete systems. You will have to put both singers into one (virtual) player (“Vocals”).

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Thanks Janus. I could (and originally I did), but I’m using two lines to enable playback of different voices.

Thanks. Manual Staff visibility works for complete bars. So long as the singers don’t crop up in the same bar, there’s not a problem using it. Well, not that I’ve found so far.

Using two instruments on a single player allows this automatically. (It will also automatically produce two separate staves if the two voices do happen to coincide)

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Thanks. I’ll try that approach.

What about using ossias?
They can start at any beat of the bar and you could “recycle” them as system for one if the singers.

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Thanks to all for the help on this.

Apologies to BassoContinuo - he’s completely correct: Manual Staff Visibility appears to be limited for whole systems, not (as I previously said) for whole bars. In notation terms this isn’t really a problem as a) I’m not making parts and b) both singers use the same clef, therefore the only changes are adding Performer tags - easy enough. The problem, as I said earlier, is with playback. Copying, muting and recolouring muted sections gets around the problem. Ungainly but it does the trick.

FWIW I have a lot of collections of songs and this is the first time I’ve come across this issue.

Thanks again.

I’d love to see a snippet (just a few measures, just the vocal line) of what you come up with when you’re finished.

Here you go. The last page - the one that caused the problems!

Last Page.zip (334.3 KB)

Thanks: looks very clear.

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