How to hide a staff line when identical with another?
OK, so, this is a bit trickly, so I’ll explain (try, I’m not a native English speaker) a bit more verbosely:
Another member of the choir I’m in and me are working on typing an SAATBB piece into the computer (from a sheet), both for extracting rehearsal MIDIs and for better legible text and, in some sections, notes.
The piece is a bit special in that the two Alto voices are the same for over 90% of the piece and only differ in a few measures. I still need to separate them on different staves for part extraction.
Printing the score will take up several pages, and to save on paper (and page turning), I would like to hide A2 when it’s the same as A1 *for any given line on the paper*.
OK, sure, I could empty it out and hide empty staff lines, but this would ① conflict with part extraction, and ② require me to fix the layout (and make later changes that effect page breaking very hard). I tend to let MuseScore take care of breaking, only occasionally adjusting with ‘{’ and ‘}’, but to not use hard linebreaks.
As for presentation, perhaps something like http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/6a/lily-8be8f671.png would be nice (except that, where the example has High Ⅰ+Ⅱ mixed, they’d be singing the exact same thing in the contracted parts), but that’s optional.
More important is that this can be made dynamically depending on whether the lines that end up in the PDF are the same or not… but I could live without that too, if it’s not supported, if I can hide (paper) lines individually (so I would have to lay it out manually but part extraction can still work).
Ordinarily I’d just set it as two voices, but that’s not supported by part extraction (and even if it were, I’d probably get silence in A2 where it is just one voice) and not good for this piece anyway (A2 is actually T1 down to F♯3 in this piece due to lack of enough Tenor singers to split them up, so I’d probably switch the clef twice in the middle).
So, can MuseScore help me here? ☺
Comments
Make Alto 2 empty where identical, hide empty staves and extract Alto 1 and 2 into one part
Or make 2 Alto 2, one complete but completly invisible in main score, the other partial and using hide empty staves, then extract the invisible one?
In reply to Make Alto 2 empty where by Jojo-Schmitz
The first suggestion would still not get me an Alto 2 part extraction.
The second one looks viable, good idea. Thanks!
In reply to The first suggestion would by mirabilos
The first one would get you an Alto 1+2 part, which might be sufficient. It is less work to keep in sync than the second approach
In reply to The first one would get you by Jojo-Schmitz
It isn’t ☺ for that I could just set them as separate voices in the same staff.
No, the wife of my colleague wants a track with just her voice. And, as you know, they’re always right ;-)
In reply to It isn’t ☺ for that I could by mirabilos
§1 Women are always right
§2 In the unlikely case they are wrong, §1 applies
It isn't possible to automate this unless you were to write a fancy PlugIn that analysed each stave and blanked or deleted one where notes matched (ought to be possible but I don't know enough about QML to do it). So, I'd just do it manually - create your score and generate parts for all and then have a copy of the main score purely for printing - in which you delete the duplicate passages. A bit of time is required but you are less likely to make mistakes than hiding things in the main score before generating parts.