Time signatures on single staves (problem with barlines)

I have my score almost ready and I would like to change time signature on a single stave. When I’m doing it, the time signature is changing only to next global change. The same is with barlines: they are dislocated only to next global change. If I want to have constantly independent time signature (e.g. open time signature without barlines), the barlines next to every global change remains for all instruments (including my independent part).
How can I choose range of bars I want to have independent time signature without any bar?

Can you post a picture to help me understand the situation, Del_Gesu?

Yes, of course.
This is the starting point:


I want to have independent open-meter (without barlines) line in Violin 1. When I change meter, it looks like this:

Only one bar is open. When I change meter in next bar to have 2-bars open-meter melody without barlines, it looks like this:

I want to have - in Violin 1 – only one open-meter sign and many bars without barlines. The rest of players should have standard meters.

It may turn out that Daniel or others have a more elegant solution than this, but depending on how many staves you have and how long this goes on for, this can pretty easily be accomplished by just doing things the other way around.

Set your global meter to X, and use alt+enter in the meter popover to give the lower strings your 3/4s and your 2/4s. After you’ve done one time signature with alt+enter, you can paste it pretty quickly using alt+click, so hopefully it shouldn’t take toooo long to switch things around.

This solution came to my mind before, but I hope there is more – as You said – elegant solution, cause I have really big score with many players and many changes of time signature. The idea of inputing polymetric music in Dorico would be useless in many cases without possibility to use it during the composition process, not only at the beginning.

I did, as snakeeyes021 said. It took me a lot of time, bacause I have different meters in every bar and about 25 staves. Dorico have to recount the note values in every change, so it’s better to change it from the end to the beginning, bacause software has less notes to recalculate. Another problem was, that in my score particular instruments are gradualy – one after another – changing their meters to ad libitum open meter. It’s really hard to figure out where I have to input global meter and where individual change to have proper result.
And, I think, my score lost some glissandi. Maybe because of the whole process of changing meters (sometimes Dorico splited one note to two tied notes, then it did it back when I restored proper time signature, but glissando dissapeared).
I have some more questions:

  1. I want to have open meter in “Penderecki style”, but even if I change the style in Engraving Options, when I input via keyboard (shift+M and then X), I have X-style open meter. I tryed to write “N” instead “X” (in Write mode bottom popover “Penderecki style” has letter N, when you point it with the mouse), but it doesn’t work. How can I have “Penderecki style” open meter without doing it manually every time?

  2. Is it possible to have individual barline style? I want to have dashed barlines in Ad libitum parts and solid in rest of the parts.

  3. Is it possible to move individual notes and not affecting the bar lenght in whole score? I need it for this ad libitum open meter parts. The players are playing in different tempo, and I need to have possibility graphicaly move notes even otside the bar of the full score.

Just like you press Alt when inputting an independent time signature, you can press Alt while requesting a different barline in the popover. Shift+B, “dashed”, Alt+Enter.

Thank you. It works. But not in every case. I don’t know why. Sometimes it sets global barline and sometimes it changes barline only in one stave. Bug or I don’t understand something?

If I could also cut the barline in a single stave, there would be second solution how to notate polymetric music:

  1. Change in one stave time signature to open meter in every global change
  2. Set „open style” to „none”, axcept the first open meter sign.
  3. Delete barlines.

For now I could only change barline to „tick”, which is less visible than normal.
Or maybe there is a way to cut barline in one stave?

Sorry for post after post, but I was wrong, when I was describing second solution to notate polymetric music. In that way Dorico won’t allow to have note durations which don’t stick to one particular mesure. Dorico will exange this durations to tied notes.