This is half a pure notation question, and half a Dorico question.
I’m writing a piece where the performer plays on a 4-zone percussion pad. The written notes for the four zones are always F-A-C-E, the four spaces on the staff. But depending on the state of the pad, the sounding pitches are actually different. There’s a one to one correspondence between attacks and sounded notes, but a wide range of actually pitches that the sounding notes cover.
I’d like to set up the score so the musician sees the main staff (with the F-A-C-E notation) large, and the sounding pitch notation reduced to maybe 70%. But I’d like the midi playback to come from the smaller staff, with the larger one muted.
Just wondering what the most efficient way to set this up would be!
I can’t speak precisely to your scenario, but for my purposes I frequently use separate playback only and score only staves, especially for stuff like special effects, sampled gliss/falls/runs, percussion effects, and so on.
Typically I just create two staves of the same instrument, and manually rename one to say (Playback). I’ll illustrate with an example on a harp:
So the top one is what I would want to score to actually be, presenting to a live player; and the second one is simply the note that must be played to trigger the sound I want to actually hear from my library. This is just a simple example but it can be as complex as you want it to be, and having the separated staves like this makes it a lot easier to keep them mentally separate.
Then, of course for the “real” staff you can either suppress playback of the notes, or sometimes I simply disconnect the track in the play tab so it’s not outputting to any VST. And then, for the playback staff, I select “Manual Staff Visibility” and hide it from the final score. It will still be visible in galley view for writing, but hidden from page view and printing. Best of both worlds.
While not the same musical scenario, I am hoping this approach could help you? By extension, I assume you could create one staff which is your F-A-C-E version you’d present to a player, and then the other staff would be your playback staff including sounding pitches exactly how you want.
If you wish to still keep and present the sounding pitch staff to a live player for reference, then of course skip the manual hide step, so that both are visible, and disconnect the F-A-C-E from VST so it’s effectively muted.
Thanks - that’s quite helpful!
I think in my case, the only real difference is that I think I want the player to be able to see both notations. That is - one will tell them what they’re supposed to play on the percussion pad, and the other will tell them what notes they should expect to hear!
But this is a great start.
