David Palmquist will, I'm sure, be able to identify with this...
I've recently had the opportunity to have some great fun playing in the orchestra for a few musicals. In the last 5 months I've done "West Side Story", Alice in Wonderland" and "Pyjama Game" - and am about to start rehearsals for "Pirates of Penzance" - I've played 'bone since about 1970 or '71, but NEVER played a musical until late last year - I'm having an absolute ball!
BUT... Some of the scores are almost illegible - these things are hired from companies like Hal Leonard, but take "Pyjama Game" - originally a handwritten score that has simply been scanned and put into book form - some bits are fine, others are almost illegible, then add cuts and changes and reordering of whole sections to suit the choreography... Enter NWC2.
Now, as many of you know, I play a 'bone and am thus reasonably conversant with the notation peculiarities associated with that instrument. Between what NWC does natively and the additions my *Dings font suites provide I can create some pretty reasonable scores, but I have a couple of real irritations:
- Glisses - it really would be soooo much easier to be able to natively notate a gliss - the text objects from the *Dings fonts "make do" pretty well, but there is nothing like the real thing. Especially if it could affect playback properly.
- Page Breaks - a couple of the parts of the score I recreated so that I could actually read them ended up with impossible page turns - no matter how hard I tried I simply couldn't get all the page turns to occur on rests. A page break command would have made this almost trivial... Sure, I would have had some short pages, but that's nothing in comparison to trying to play and turn a page at the same time. (In hindsight I could have just created some blank staves and used some "digital white-out" but I was in a hurry and didn't think of it...)
I guess I'm really just having a bit of a grumble, but I'd really like these things - I know they're in the wishlist 'cos I put 'em there ages ago...
Yup. Folks that don't play solo or in small ensembles just don't appreciate how critical page breaks are.
Filling every page and line is way down on my priority list, well after avoiding page and line breaks in the middle of tricky areas.
I suggested some time ago that back to back barlines, both with 'Force System Break' set, ought to throw a new page.
Checking 'Force System Break' ought also to open up 2 spinboxes:
- Indent this system (on right):
- Indent next system (on left):
It would help greatly with finding jumps. Codas are almost always indented in "store bought" music.
I am really choked. I wrote a long reply to Lawrie's message, probably took half an hour to write. Then I pressed send and got a message saying another reply had been posted by someone else while I was writing mine. Now mine seems to have disappeared.
So much for fond memories. Oh well, it wouldn't have meant much to anyone who doesn't play in pits, anyway.
I've had a couple of those as well David.
Once you've experienced it a couple of times, you tend to remember to copy what you've written before clicking "post".
G'day Rick,
Good ideas all.
Must have been. They have been included in the Boundary Change Command (http://ntworthy.com/nwc2/help/MNU_ADDSIZER.htm).