Respacing bars

Welcome to the forum, Maarten! I’m sorry, but I’m not 100% clear on what you want Dorico to do. Dorico does space the music precisely according to the notes added to the bars.

Thanks so much for your welcome Daniel. Appreciated.
My question seems already (mostly) obsolete. When writing it occurred a few times that notes inside a bar were unequally distributed. When I then changed from 3 bars per system to two bars per system that unequal distribution disappeared. So problem gone (although there may be a more elegant way to “reformat”.
Now I have the entire piece set for two bars per system, also when in a few spots a (low) number of notes barely justifies to have only two bars per system. That generates the question: is there a setting through which the software takes charge and determines per system for the participating instruments the most appropriate number of bars? In one case that could be, for example, 2 bars per system, but a little further that could be 5 bars per system.
Happy to pick your brains on this. Thanks.

PS. By the way, I hugely appreciate those many ways to find support for working with Dorico.

Maarten, that is what Dorico does by default. If you selected “Fixed number of bars per system” in Layout Options / Staves and Systems, just untick the box.

If you don’t like the default note spacing (for example if you are engraving old music written mostly in half and whole notes, where Dorico’s spacing will be too wide because it is designed to look good with 8th and 16 notes) you can change that in Layout Options / Note Spacing, and Dorico will then calculate the number of bars per system based on your note spacing values.

Further to what Rob’s said, you can also change the Note Spacing settings anywhere you like, by going into Engrave mode, selecting an object (note/barline/dynamic etc.) and then clicking on the Engrave menu and then “Note Spacing Change”. The dialog that appears is hopefully self explanatory.

Thanks so much Rob & pianoleo, that’s precisely what I was hoping for. Super.
Maarten

Hi Daniel,
I’m rather at a loss how the forum actually functions, ie. how can I ask questions and how can I see answers (if these come)?
Few days ago I put three questions in but when trying to send I was asked to indicate to whom I should send this. How am I to know? Eventually I could not submit my questions.

Anyway, below again my three questions:

My Control Save does not save my project. I have checked a number of times if, after the ^SAVE command the time of saving was adjusted but NOP, it wasn’t. Admittedly I have lost quite some freshly produced material because of this.

Whenever I start up DORICO and click on “recent projects” a window opens that is way larger than one of the two monitors I’m working on. The same is true when clicking on “engraving options”. The required adjustment of the window size is always a bit of a pain. Can the needed adjustment be done somewhere in the software?

I do quite a bit with voices. I have noticed that the voice pitch seems slightly below the instrumental pitches for the same tone. Also, the voice tone seems always to come slightly after the instruments supposedly played at the same time. Where can the needed pitch and timing adjustment be fine tuned?

Hope this reaches you.
Thanks in advance,
Maarten Siebel

Maarten, in terms of how this forum works you just need to ensure you have the main forum in front of you.

The other day you evidently clicked in the top right corner of the screen, where it says “private messages”, and you then proceeded to write a private message rather than a forum post. I know this because I was the recipient!

Maarten, are you on Windows or Mac? If you choose File > Save from the menu, do you find that the project is saved correctly? If you’re on Windows, you should see an asterisk in the title bar when the document has unsaved changes, and it should go away when you save; on Mac, you should see a black dot in the red traffic light at the top left corner of the window, and likewise it should go away when you save.

What is the resolution of your screen? We recommend at least 1280 x 1024 as the minimum resolution to use Dorico comfortably.

As for the pitch and timing of the vocal sounds in HSSE, I’m afraid there’s nothing much you can do about this: they sound late, and they sound flat. We are looking into replacing the vocal sounds in a future version.

Thanks Leo for responding. True enough, I am confused about how this works and sorry to push that confusion into your mailbox.
If I would just know where/how to find that “main forum” I would not bother you anymore. However, …
The link under which I’m presently writing is:

Does that tell me that I’m in the main forum? If so, I made progress based on your response (the part you don’t see in my mail reads: https://www.steinber.net/forums/

Thanks Maarten

The note-spacing segment of layout options, combined with the fact that you can change the spacing at any point in a layout is very powerful. I tighten the spacing a bit by default in most of the baroque stuff I transcribe in Dorico, but for continuo parts, it is amazing how useful the ability to tighten it further locally can be, specifically for page turns. It is actually quite rare that I need a fold-out for continuo using these techniques on 9x18 paper. ANd it still looks beautiful …

Daniel I responded to your mail responses to my “three question in one mail”. But when submitting I had to login again. Now I am unsure whether you received my responses. If not, no problem in composing my answer again.

In short,

Yes I am on Windows.
I see an asterisk when project is not saved. After saving, the asterisk is gone.
Screen resolution is 1920 x 1080.
I understand the off-pitch is a given for now.
Thx again, Maarten

What is your Windows display scaling set to? At 1920 x 1080, you should have more than enough room to see the Steinberg Hub on your display.

Bringing back this thread. What if you are making blank stave paper with bar lines, so have a bunch of bars with invisible rests, and you want a set size for each. Any way to increase the bar size without using the Engrave mode ‘bar size tweaker’? Just in case a new option has been invented in the last couple of years.

There’s a layout option now to not display bar rests in empty bars.

Thanks much. What I settled on as the best solution is to put in whole notes along the top line, and set the opacity to zero. Then put in system breaks every four bars (I want four bars/page), and then go in and use the tweaker to space the bars out nicely. Works great! Took a few small tricks, but I’ve got a beautifully laid out orchestral sketch pad template.

The only thing I couldn’t figure out was on the first page, the master page wants to put a flow heading at the top which I don’t want. I had to do a first page override to erase it out.

Otherwise pretty slick, I’m getting the hang of Dorico and it’s really powerful and easy to use once you get a handle on it, which isn’t hard.

Layout Options–Page Setup–Flows–Show flow header “Never”

Thanks!!