Feature Request: Vamp Lines

• Sep 1, 2017 - 14:48

In music meant to accompany live performance, such as in musical theatre, 'vamp' bars are used to extend the music used to underscore dialogue or actions on stage if it over runs the allotted music. These are marked by a distinct set of bar lines (See attached screen shot), in this example running from bar 149 to bar 156. These bar lines would be quite nice to have, especially as I write quite a few of my compositions for theatre. They are a useful short hand for the musicians playing the music to distinguish them from regular repeat marks. They would be able to act exactly like regular repeat bars, only having a slightly different appearance in the sheet music and parts.

Attachment Size
2017-09-01 (3).png 250.07 KB

Comments

You can put in repeat barlines without having them repeat. Right click the last measure before the repeat, select measure properties and set play count to 1. The caesura can have the delay set from 0 to 10 seconds by setting the pause in the inspector.

Added: You can set the wingtips to on in the style->General then Barlines menu.

I'm not quite understanding what you mean - these look like like regular repeat signs to me. Maybe you are referring to the "wings" above and below the barline? Those are not anything specific to vamps, they are just an alternate style of of repeat marks common in jazz and other popular music forms. To enable them, go to Style / General / Repeats.

If you are saying that music theater commonly uses these only for vamps, could you show some published examples that clarify this - eg, music from a single score that shows both types of repeat mark used, one for vamps and one not? If that's really a standard we could certainly consider adding support for this type of per-instance as opposed to global usage.

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