Worksheet Creation - Workaround free

We have recently made the move from Sibelius to Dorico as a music department. This was a decision not made lightly with 12 staff having to relearn the ins and outs of a new piece of software. The decision was based on a number of factors.

  1. Dorico features not available in Sibelius.
  2. A desire to stop relying on workarounds.
  3. A sense that Sibelius development had stalled with little hope of major advancement in the software.

Generally speaking, the staff are happy with using Dorico for composing/aranging. However, worksheet and music resource creation are creating headaches. At this stage most are ignoring the Engrave mode to create resources in favour of creating slices to bring into Word.

The most commonly required things are as follows;

  1. Hiding notes/rest.
  2. Hiding ledger lines.
  3. Hiding stems/beams leaving just note heads.
  4. Creating stem and beam notation above empty sections of music without noteheads.
  5. Creating custom note spacings to accomodate students writing into empty sections.

We have achieved many of these things, although we feel like we are back in workaround territory when we are hiding things using an opacity change. But, the general comment is that things are far less intuitive to change. Obviously, the Sibelius approach allows you to drag notes, baronies, systems etc very easily. The decision to require you to be a little more deliberate in Dorico I think is the right one. However, the inclusion of a few changes would help immensely.

I would love to see the following

  1. A hide/show toggle in the properties panel for noteheads, stems and beams, and ledger lines.
  2. The ability to alt/option drag note spacing handles rather than rely on the alt/arrow keys and alt/command arrow keys.

For those of us who have embraced Engrave mode and the use of multiple flows to create content solely in Dorico, I would love to see the following.

  1. Introduction of alignment markers for all objects (Similar to what you would see in Pages or Keynote).
  2. The ability to cut and paste frames with their content between different layouts and different projects.
  3. The ability to define staff size frame by frame.

I’d be interested to hear everyone else’s thought. Possibly there are items on the wish list that have already been solved, but we are yet to find them. Any tips appreciated!

Finally, thanks to the Dorico team for such a wonderful product. I look forward to needing to use it and luckily get plenty on opportunities.

1 Like

You can remove rests, which will ‘hide’ them.

You can certainly Hide Stems - there’s a property for it in Engrave mode.

You can change the Note Spacing value at any grid position.

Producing an education worksheet where bit of notation are ‘missing’, for the student to fill in is perhaps a special case (in terms of notation), though not an uncommon one.

You can also hide ledger lines - in Properties when in Engrave mode.

Stem and ledger lines are easily hidden via the Properties Panel.
Note Spacing can be changed at any point.
Staff size can be changed at any System/Frame break.

NO software will be completely workaround free.

So, most of your issues answered I believe. But hiding noteheads - this is something I really want and Dorico won’t do it for a host of technical reasons (which I disagree with, because in lioypond it is trivial, so it’s not impossible). But here is a topic that discusses what to with very useful instructions:

Thanks to everyone for their help. The whole office has benefitted.