How to stop these invisible rests from ruining my measure?
In a contemporary-ish piece I'm working on, there's a single measure where every instrument plays a different melody in a random tempo - kind of like the score below. Since the melodies are all different in length, I had to make the "actual bar duration" as long as the longest melody. I made the unnecessary rests in the other parts invisible.
This solution works fine for the oboe part in this example, but the flute and clarinet now have an empty hole in their measure where the invisible rests are. I've done some searches on this forum and I believe there currently isn't a truly "correct" way to make invisible objects not take up any space, so I'm really looking for a workaround here.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Invisible_Example.mscz | 7.83 KB |
Comments
So you want 7/4 to use the same space as 5/4, this looks like a task for tuplets, see attached
The tuplet solution is definitely one way to go. In case it isn't obvious, there are tuplets in JoJo's solution, but he has set them to not display numbers or brackets. You can access them via the Inspector, however - select the first note of the oboe part and then the Tuplet button in the Inspector.
Another possible solution is to use "local" time signatures - have each staff in its own time signature, by Ctrl+dragging the appropriate time signatures, but this feature is frankly pretty buggy.
If it were me, I'd probably go for simplicity and simply not worry about it in the score, then in the parts use manual adjustments of the positions of the notes where needed. But the tuplet solution is awfully clever and more "correct".
In reply to The tuplet solution is… by Marc Sabatella
So you are revealing my dirty little secrets ;-)
It would even be possible to keep the measures at 4/4 and make 5/4 and 7/4 tuplets in those measures
In reply to So you are revealing my… by Jojo-Schmitz
Those are three solutions that I never would have thought of (I even forgot manual offsets existed for a second there). I'm going for the tuplets, thank you!