[Solved] Can I completely remove ossia? Issue with cue.

I have a tenor/piano score. To show my singer an optional accompaniment in a few measures*, I used “ossia” to show the alternate. After his approval, I cut and pasted the notes from ossia into the regular piano score. Then I deleted the +/-2 staves flags for the ossia (also tried “Remove > Staff”). I know there’s a cool feature where ossia notes remain in the project, in case you want to lengthen it again, but in my case I want it completely gone. I’ve tried recreating the ossia and making sure everything was deleted, then removing the staff again.

The problem is with cues. Adding a cue and typing “piano”, I get four choices: Piano (a), (b), c and d. There should only be two: a and b. So Dorico still thinks there’s ossia stuff in the flow.

How can I make the ossia go away completely, so that Dorico thinks it’s gone forever?

*Next time I’ll add another piano player, and put the alternate arrangement there.

You can’t do this directly yourself, except by creating a new piano player and instrument and copying and pasting the material from one to the other, then deleting the original one with the unwanted extra staves. If that seems unfeasible for some reason, you can zip up and attach the project here and I’ll perform some surgery for you.

Thanks, Daniel. That works great. No surgery needed from you.

Due to layouts it was easier to put piano 2’s music back into piano 1, so I didn’t have to fool around with the piano 2 layout. Otherwise I found myself fixing Engrave stuff for piano 2. Cut and paste seemed easier and safer than trying to figure out Engrave and page settings for the piano part, which for piano 1 was all good.

This takes longer to explain than to do it, and it was fairly painless:

  1. Setup: Add a piano 2 player/instrument.
  2. Write: Cut piano 1 and paste to piano 2 – all of the problem flow. (I did an extra step of revising the ossia from piano 1 (c) to piano 2 (a), but don’t think it’s necessary).
  3. Setup: Delete piano 1 from the flow (but leave in all the other flows). I’m not sure this step was absolutely necessary. But I figured this might delete the ossia staffs for good.
  4. Setup: Add piano 1 back in. Again, may not be necessary along with previous step!
  5. Write: Cut piano 2, paste into piano 1.
  6. Setup: delete piano 2 player from all flows.
  7. Write: Revise the ossia from piano 2(a) to piano 1(a). Probably could have skipped this step along with step 2 second part, as the ossias should have automatically populated correctly.

@dspreadbury Will you help me? (Not sure if you have to do manual surgery on my file.)

But I’m creating a template for my musical theatre scores. And somehow, I’d previously added what I believe may have been an ossias staff (for add’l instrument cues) to one of the keyboard staves, in both the Full Score and Keyboard I/Conductor part. [For three different files/shows.]

But now, I think I’d like to remove that ossias staff in each file/show and just create an instrument variant with three staves to accomplish the same thing. This is for a Piano/Conductor part for a musical theatre score.

[Since the scores collectively are ~12 MB, I can share them with you directly via a Google Drive link.]

I’ll take suggestions or help you can offer. Thanks!!

Welcome to the forum @dspreadbury!

Check out this recent thread:

Does this help?

Oops… welcome to you as well @janisianmitchell

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Thanks, D. But to answer your question, since I’m not seeing any signposts, I can’t confidently say they were ossias staves. But in Write, I went into Edit > Notations > Staff > Remove Staff and just added those staves I needed.

This is what you should see if you have created an ossia:

Double-check that you have Signposts, and importantly Staff Count Changes, visible.

If you still can’t see the Signpost etc and Dorico is still showing several different piano staff choices when adding a Cue (as per the original post of this thread):

  • try creating a new flow and see if the extra staff is still displayed (as per the advice from @Mark_Johnson)
  • attach a project with just one of the affected flows, remove all music, and enable the Silence Playback Template. This will usually shrink the project size enough to attach.
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That was it! You’re a unicorn, and I appreciate you so much.

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You’re welcome!

Just out of interest, what was the fix?

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I unknowingly had the signposts off, so your suggestion helped!
Eleanor test.dorico (1.3 MB)