Potential of using condensing in Continuo parts

[Chris_Davey]

Has anyone else been using condensing for Continuo parts? I’d be interested to hear your experience.

Here’s a page of vocal music I’ve been engraving this last week. For me the benefits are significant, giving the continuo player a lot of information efficiently and allowing more systems per page.

At the moment you can’t reduce the staff size of condensed staves. However you can increase the size of the Continuo part since it’s not condensed, which effectively does the same thing. In this score I’ve set the rastral size of this layout to 4.8mm and the Continuo staff size to 130%, giving an effective staff size for the Continuo of 6.2mm.

I’ve used custom condensing groups to put each choir onto two staves SA / TB, choosing the right combination of Notation Options to make all the staves appear as I want them.

An option to suppress player labels would be useful. For now I’ve set each instrument short name to a single space.

Maybe at some time an option will allow us to suppress redundant lyrics. To achieve this at the moment I’ve had to save a separate file and delete the lyrics I didn’t want to show, just leaving the ones needed by the continuo player to navigate. It’s striking how lyrics clutter the score (and your mind) in this situation.

Heartfelt appreciation to the Dorico team for all you’ve done, and looking forward to all you will do!

[dan_kreider]

Forgive the question if it’s elementary, but have you tried using the native Reduce feature for this?

[Chris_Davey]

Thanks Dan.

I wouldn’t have had so much fun exploring this fantastic feature!

My next score may have a variety of instruments and a five part choir. I’ve added the word Potential to the title.

[benwiggy]

I’ve created ‘mini-score’ continuo parts before, but because the mini-score parts are not needed in any other score or part, I’ve created new Players. There’s usually sufficient alteration/adaptation needed to warrant it, e.g. as you say suppressing redundant lyrics.