Page control...
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...