Hi,
Here’s a screen capture of my score. The first 18 bars are tacit for this instrument (the full score has many other instruments). But because I change the tempo multiple times, these 18 bars cannot be combined into a single multi-rest bar.
JM.
I’m afraid this subject has already been talked about many times… And I don’t remember any workaround. The behavior of silent bars have recently changed when indications are on the first beat of the bar, but it is not the case here, with many tempo changes…
Don’t forget that the purpose of the part is to help somebody play it correctly, not to look neat.
I guess the first bar after letter A is split because your MM 120 mark is in the middle of the bar (which might just be careless engraving…). The first bars might benefit from adding some cues to help the player count, which would also make them look less “sparse.”
We consider what Dorico does in this situation correct. The resting player still needs to know about the tempo changes so that he or she can orientate him/herself to what the conductor is doing. We don’t have any plans to change this.
If you really want to make it look neat, take advantage of the magnificent cue handling in Dorico. Populate some of those bars with well chosen cues, your players will thank you!
Thanks for all the nice and useful suggestions and pointers! While all these are really practical and good suggestions (and I agree that Dorico is working correctly regarding its treatment of multi-bar rests), I just want to present my argument for consideration of a special ‘Tacit’ mode.
What if, as in my case, there is no need for the player to care about the empty bars (because he can hear them and he knows when his part will come)? Or if there is a conductor, he can inform the player to get ready? So if the first 18 bars can be condensed into a single multi-bar rest, then this will save a lot of space on the score. This is because (I’m presenting an argument here for a TACIT feature) the information created (the multiple changes of tempo) by Dorico in those rest bars provide no help to this particular player at all (he doesn’t need to know), and what he wants is a more concise score.
JM.
If what you really want is a tacet for 18 measures, then perhaps you should put those measures into their own flow. Yes, this is probably more work for you than you would like, but on the other hand it involves less work than it would be for the Development Team to institute this as a features that more or less defies conventional practice.
I don’t know if it would be massively complicated or not to implement. I imagine from a user perspective, it could be as simple as selecting certain elements from a list in Layout Options and instructing them to be hidden when placed within multi-bar rests.
In general, I do agree that significant changes should absolutely be visible in the score. But perhaps minutiae like poco rit could be omitted.
On a somewhat related note, I still remain hopeful that “tacet al fine” could be expanded to omit such elements, at least.
