Rehearsal letters and Bar numbering

Dorico
1

Hi folks,

while I was tidying up my harddrives I viewed older score for different customers/publishers. And they all treat certain things differently.

Quite a few customers expect 2 diffenent Rehearsal marks in one score, - large ones with letters for wider sections reflecting musical ideas/themes and smaller ones with bar numbers for smaller sections to indicate smaller forms (ie. A - A’ - B - A).

1) Will this be possible, - both types automated in one score?

A lot of customers expect a rehearsal mark at the beginning of a line rather left aligned on top of a clef while rehearsal marks in the middle of a line should be placed centered above the staff.

2) Will there be different settings for rehearsal marks, - whether at the beginning or in the middle of a line fully automated so that one has not to think about and to re-align them when re-adjusting page breaks?

Quite a lot of publishers, especially for young concert band, are calling for bar numbers on every bar centered above or below the barline depending on the musical content (ledgerlines, slurs etc.)

3) Will it be possible to have both above and below the bar line in one file? ie. Flute below but Tuba above. In Finale this can be handled with overlaying bar number regions. In Sibelius one most commonly has to extract/decouple parts in the final process.

4) Will it be possible to re-start bar numbers at any point in a score? ie. A truckload of songs in one file would always let start a song with a bar 1.

5) Will it be possible to switch between counting all bars being played in a repetition region including house 1, 2, etc. and just counting all printed bars no matter how often those are repeated?

ie.: a given 8 bar phrase including a house 1 and a house 2 would be counted as

(variation 1) bar 1 - 7, bar 8 is house 1, bar 9 - 15, bar 16 is house 2
or
(variation 2) bar 1 - 7, bar 8 is house 1 and bar 9 is house 2.

2

  1. Yes, you can have multiple sequences of rehearsal marks in the same score, though they must each be of a separate sequence type, and at present, our sequence types are limited to A, B, C…, 1, 2, 3…, or bar numbers.

  2. Rehearsal marks are automatically positioned horizontally and vertically. Rehearsal marks at the start of the system are aligned with the right-hand edge of the preamble, i.e. directly after the clef/key signature (and, if present, time signature). Rehearsal marks are centred over barlines if they occur later in the system.

  3. You can have bar numbers positioned differently in each layout within your project; indeed, they can be shown in every bar and centred on the bar below the stave, drawn in a circle in one layout, and shown above the stave only at the start of the system in another. Hopefully there is sufficient flexibility there.

  4. Yes, you can insert a bar number change at any point, including restarting the numbering, skipping a number, or adding subordinate numbers (e.g. 3, 3a, 3b, 3c, 4) to handle insertions without changing all of the other bar numbers, as if often necessary in music for musical theatre and dance.

  5. We don’t have any real support for repeats in Dorico just yet, but the plan is that when we do, bar numbering will optionally be able to take account of repeats in the way you describe.

3

Thanks a lot, Daniel…

has been always some sort of a nightmare…

4

Possibly related question:

I want bar numbers as rehearsal marks. I would like one every eight bars. However: the first rehearsal mark (bar number) should be at bar 5, then 13, 21 … Haven’t found a way. Is there one?

Possibly related in extension:

Layout options > Select all > Bar numbers – Enclosure type. At some stage I opted for Circular. Now I can’t change it, the three options are greyed out. How come, I wonder?

That last one is solved: Since I at some point opted differently for score and parts, I now have to change one layout by one.

5

You don’t have to change each layout one by one: in the Layout Options dialog you can click the button to select all part layouts, and then change the options for all layouts at once.

If you want “rehearsal marks” that look like bar numbers that should be shown in circles every eight bars, surely you should just set your bar numbers to do that in Layout Options and not use actual rehearsal marks at all…?

6

Indeed; what I couldn’t find, however, was a way to place the first bar number/rehearsal mark at a specific bar (say, bar 5), and then have bar numbers as rehearsal marks at regular intervals (say, every four bars).

Sorry, I’m confusing even myself. What I want, be it as rehearsal marks or (preferably) as enclosed bar numbers, is for the first marked bar number to be at an “irregular” bar, compared to the frequency I set for the following marked bar numbers. If that makes sense.

7

OK, now I understand. I’m afraid at the moment you can’t specify the first bar at which bar numbers should appear and then a different interval for further bar numbers, so you would have to use rehearsal marks and create them at each desired point instead, at present at any rate.