Zelinsky Assignment 2 Orchestration 2.dorico (947.4 KB)
Can anyone give any suggestions on how I can make the score look better? Any suggestions will be helpful. I had to reduce the staff size quite a bit because strangely systems were colliding.
I was wondering about the lack of a2 in horns, for instance, because the phrases don’t exactly match so they won’t condense. Is this okay or should I try to force an “a2” until the parts differ?
Thank you again for any advice.
This is quite a challenging example to space pleasingly, because you have quite a lot of vertical pressure on each page, with notes on ledger lines above the staff and dynamics below the staff, with more or less every note marked up with a dynamic. You might consider whether all of the hairpins, for example, are strictly necessary, and whether using text markings like “cresc.” and “dim.” might be just as effective while giving you a bit more breathing room vertically. You could also consider using clef changes or octave lines for extended passages that are particularly high or low on the staff, and using a transposed rather than concert pitch layout will also help a bit (e.g. by notating bass clarinet using the bass F clef rather than the treble G clef).
It would also be more conventional to use Tabloid (or possibly even larger) paper rather than Letter, and to use a correspondingly larger staff size. Even with a staff size as small as rastral size 6, there’s still a lot of vertical pressure, particularly in the huge tutti at the end of the exercise.
Thank you, Daniel. I’ll consider all of that. II just went to page setup and I didn’t see A3 or Tabloid paper option though.
So is it possible to have the bass clarinet showing F clef in the score to fix this problem yet have it treble clef in the parts for the player?
Thank you again for your help. I’ve looked at trying to custom condense my horns into a2, for instance. I’ve read some instructions, but I really can’t get how to, for instance at my letter E, how to manually condense horns 3 and 4 until they become different. I just couldn’t figure that out.
The options in the right panel in Print mode are specifically for printing, they don’t change anything about the layout itself - for that you want to go into Layout Options as described above. In Print mode, the paper sizes offered for printing depend on the capability of the connected and selected printer.
For manually condensing horns, if that’s what you want to do, insert a condensing change where you want them to be unison, then another condensing change where they’re different again that either resets them back to the defaults or sets them up differently manually again.
However, if they truly are playing in unison but simply aren’t appearing as unison on the condensed staff, you might want to investigate why that is, as fixing any irregularities might prompt Dorico to show them as unison automatically. For instance, if any of their dynamics are different (even if the dynamics themselves are the same on both staves but on one staff, the dynamics are grouped and on the other staff are ungrouped) that will affect the condensing result. Slurs affect condensing too. If it’s not that, it could be that there’s no rest in either part between them being totally in unison and being different - Dorico considers each phrase separately for condensing, and phrases are defined as being “between rests”. So simply adding a condensing change and activating the checkbox for the group, but not setting anything else, can prompt Dorico to review phrasing either side of that condensing change (treating it like a “phrase break”).
Thank you. I did understand all of that which you wrote and read up on all of that beforehand and I guess I need to find a good tutorial for that manual condensing change because I couldn’t figure it out.
I’m going through some condensing tutorials on Youtube. Thank you for your help, Lillie!