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Topic: Limited Features when making Band/Orchestral Scores (Read 2585 times) previous topic - next topic

Limited Features when making Band/Orchestral Scores

If you look at any professionally printed Orchestral Full Score, it has the parts divided into different sections.  I have a score right in front of me right now, and it uses Noteworthy Orchestral Braces for sections such as Woodwinds, Brass, etc.

However, in NWC or NWC2, you can only have the brace tops/bottoms at the top and bottom of the entire score, not in groups.<Image Link>  (I know you can force a bar break by making an empty staff set to Standard and layering it with the above staff.)

Any reccomendations?
 

Re: Limited Features when making Band/Orchestral Scores

Reply #2 –
   I use NWC 1.75 to do a lot of choral work; a typical instance is like the Choral number (13) "The Heavens are telling" in Haydn's "Creation", which - in the New Novello score - has three soloists singing with an SATB Chorus plus the two-staff piano reduction. 

   In the Novello score:-

   For the solo voices each staff has a first bar that has on its left a single line (the thin one that joins ALL the staves together); however, the staves' bar lines are NOT joined ('cos that would break up the "lyric" words positioned below the staves) - thus, they're "Standard".

   For the SATB Chorus, however, each staff has an orchestral left-hand first bar line - that is the "double" line (where the left hand bit is thicker than the thin right hand bit).  This extends over all the SATB staves, and the top and bottom ends of the thick line are bent over, rather like a staple, to "enclose" the staves.  Again, the staves' bar lines are NOT joined - thus, they're "Standard" even though the first bars are joined "orchestrally" on their left.

   The piano reduction staves are different.  These have upper and lower braces over the single thin line marking the left of the first bar, and the staves' bar lines extend from one staff to the other, so as to join up.

   Replicating this with NWC seems impossible, though I feel sure it ought not to be.  The "problem" with NWC in its present incarnation seems to be that although, as long as no staff is identified as orchestral, then all the staves are joined at the far left by a single, thin line, even if two staves are upper/lower grand staff staves ... neverthless as soon as any one staff is orchestral then they all switch to the double left hand line first bar format.  One would expect them to use this format only for those staves actually identified as orchestral, but no: they do it for all, regardless.  In a more general sense, one would expect to have total control over the line on the left hand side of the first bars in the set of staves, and - quite independently - total control over the bar lines in the body of each staff.

   This is, I think, what Phil Dixon wants, and perhaps what K.A.T. is advocating when he says he'd like

    Visual tab
                Style:    Upper Brace
                          Upper Bracket
                          Upper Brace and Bracket
                          Lower Brace
                          Lower Bracket
                          Lower Brace and Bracket
                          Standard
                          Orchestral
                          Open

    MusicJohn, 4/Sep/06