Music Frame Chains

thomas-interlude.dorico (1.5 MB)

Attached is a project file for retuned keyboard; the project contains 3 flows:

Flow 1: Tuning information for the keyboard;
Flow 2: The composition itself, which uses the custom tonality system;
Flow 3: The actual printed notation the player will see (this one doesn’t require custom accidentals since the work will be played on a standard keyboard).

All I need to print or distribute is the first page of the project, and it includes Flows 1 & 3. When I try to either delete the music frames on pages 2 & 3, or unlink the tuning information frame from MA, it adds another page to the project which includes the flows in the MA chain.

So, my question is this:

Can I make a project where the unneeded flows (for printing) do not appear in any music frames (that is, can the MA chain be removed and replaced with my own music frames which only include the flows I want)?

I suspect my situation is because I do not understand how these frame chains work, I’ve consulted the Music frame chains webpage, but I still don’t understand what’s going on.

I realize a workaround for this is simply printing page 1, but I plan on expanding this project to include several movements, and each movement would have two versions: a sounding version and a written version. The sounding versions don’t need to be printed or engraved at all, and prefer to not have extraneous pages floating around at the end of the project — it’s not as clean as I’d like.

If there’s any online resources that can explain this for me, please link those. Admittedly, I’m not as adept with the page layout options as I’d like.

Thanks,
Jude

Create a new master page set (or you may not even need to do that). Then edit the first master page. In the MA music frame, deselect the flows you want hidden.

1 Like

Hi Jude,

Firstly I think you’ve been caught out by search results often returning links to older versions of the docs - that’s for Dorico 1, and a lot has changed in the manual since then - the page about music frame chains in the 3.5 manual is here, and although this particular page is actually not that different, there is a little bit more info there including about what happens to frame chains when you import master pages.

There’s some information about how Dorico automatically adds/removes pages as required to show the music in the layout and in the master page music frame chain in this topic too - I’ve made a note to add some of this in the topics around frame chains too.

Essentially:

2 Likes

Thank you both!