A quick question about the upcoming Dorico Percussion release

Daniel,

Is something like this going to be doable with the next release of Dorico?


I do a lot of percussion stuff as you know, and this would be for a snare drum (snare drum section or snare drum solo) and this is what I am anxiously awaiting.

Sorry if this post sounds a little “needy”. I am just so excited for this functionality.

Robby

Well, you can add the hands used via the lyrics tool. It’s not convenient, but it will work until articulations for that purpose come along.

Yeah I could do that, except that in drum notation the dynamics generally go below the sticking. The lyric tool forces the stickings below the dynamics. And to make these changes in Engrave mode would be quite time consuming.
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Plus, I also like to use a 5 line stave for snare drum, even though a 1 line staff works as well.

Robby

It will certainly be possible to write that kind of five-line example in the new update. Unfortunately we have not been able to implement a dedicated feature for entering percussion stickings, and using lyrics is a decent substitute for that, but I’m afraid we don’t at the moment have a solution for making the lyrics go inside dynamics. I will think about whether we can change that: on a vocal staff it would normally make no difference, of course, because typically the dynamics go above the staff anyway, but I fear that it ought still to be the case that lyrics go below dynamics on a vocal staff, in which case we can’t easily subvert this convention just to accommodate the requirements of writing percussion stockings, particularly since we would ultimately plan to have a proper feature for this anyway.

I beg to differ. As a composer and arranger of choral music I would like to have the option to chose this as well. There are times when it’s much more practical to have the dynamics outside of the lyrics, and there are examples in the printed literature (as in the two attachments).