Good day Dorico friends!
In the full score of this choral piece, each verse begins on beat 4.
Some accompanying instruments begin on the following beat 1
In the instrumental layout or part, a multi-rest shows the up beat as one whole bar, (bars 10 and 19) but it’s only one beat.
How do I get to show a quarter rest (beat 4) rather that a multi-rest (which suggests a whole bar of 4 beats)?
At bar 10, enter a time signature of 4/4,1. Then hide it from the properties panel.
Thank you Leo, that worked.
I’d like to understand why. How should I be creating bars with different beats from the time signature? Did I do this incorrectly?
I guess the question is: when should I create a bar this way (4/4,3) for a bar of 3 beats at the end of a verse rather than create it this way (3/3)
The number after the comma in Leo’s example indicates an upbeat (in the denomination of the specified time signature).
What Derek said. 3/3 doesn’t mean anything, at least metrically (well, in conventional music notation). Meter, comma, number of beats for the pickup.
You can also do 4/4,1.5 for three 8th notes pickup, or even a larger value than the numerator.
My supposition is that when you create a pickup bar (e.g. 4/4,3) you are telling Dorico that you’re firmly in 4/4 but there’s a pickup bar that doesn’t match the time signature, and thus the beats must be shown.
When you create a 3/4 bar and a 1/4 and then a 4/4 bar, there’s nothing irregular about these bars: they contain the number of beats the time signature stipulates. There’s no reason for Dorico to flag these bars with spelt out rests; the time signature does that.
Yes, I’ve always completely understood that and use it all the time. I was wondering, in the middle of a piece, how one should create bars of different beats. Different ways seem to give different results in some cases.
Thanks Leo for explaining that. Excellent!
Dorico has some heuristics for determining whether an irregular bar after the start of the flow should be treated as a pick-up, which are a bit too subtle for me to be able to recall them reliably off the top of my head, but the intention is to support this kind of use case.
There’s no need to re-define time signatures with an upbeat in the middle of a piece, if the preceding bar is simply the complement of the the upbeat. Just add a system break between (e.g.) the 3rd and 4th beat to shift the upbeat to the next system.
…assuming that David doesn’t want a barline at the end of the previous system.
Fair point though.
