Vocal score rehearsal notes

I have just transferred from Finale to Dorico. I am generating a vocal score with accompaniment i.e. vocal staffs plus piano. Most of the Piano part is required but parts of the piece are a capella but in the piano part there are rehearsal only notes to assist singers learning the piece. I would like to notate these rehearsal notes by placing a mid bar opening bracket across the piano staff and having reduced size notes followed by a closing mid bar bracket. I can’t see how to do this in Dorico, especially the cross staff brackets What is the best way of achieving this?

Welcome to the forum. Making the small notes can be done from the lower panel (command-8 on Mac) - select the notes you want to be smaller, and in the far left of the lower zone, there is a Scale option to make them cue-sized, etc.

Maybe for the bracket you could use the line tool, found in the right-hand panel (command-9)?

Welcome to the forum @chris_sanders !

How I tend to see this done is by making the piano staves themselves smaller - this is how to do that in Dorico:

Then you can rename the piano instrument to include “(for rehearsal only)” or a similar direction, which will appear in the staff labels. Typically that is also in an italic font; you can make specific parts of instrument names italics using the options in the Edit Instrument Names dialog.

You can add an extra instrument and name that rehearsal notes (or whatever), enter your rehearsal notes in this instrument and the set a cue for it in the piano part. If you set the visibility off the piano to hide when empty the grand staff will change to single staff at the moment it is empty and you only see the cue (small notes).

You have to take care to set the system breaks because if there are notes in the total grand staff the visibility will remain.

If you have to make the piano part for the performance, turn off show cues in layout options.

Many thanks for your help. I have found the vertical brackets under the line tool, and does what I need. I have scaled the notes to cue size and that scale is fine.

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