I often find that I want to change the voicing of instruments. This can be a major issue if I have to set an arrangement into a different key. I might have to move notes around on almost every player, every bar.
I use the swap measures command a lot, but AFAIK, this only works with two players at a time. Let’s say I have 4 trumpets playing a chord, but the tessitura is too low. If it is a tight voicing, I might be inclined to move the 4th trumpet’s notes up an octave and give them to the 1st trumpet, then move the Tpt 1,2,3 notes to the next lower player.
It gets more complicated on chords that aren’t tightly voiced. In that case, I might want to tighten the voicing, or expand it, so any player’s note could go to any other player, possibly moved up or down an octave.
Has anybody come up with a fast way to do this kind of thing? I wonder if we need a re-voice tool, where I could select all the affected measures and go to a pop-up where I could more easily move things around.
One method I can think of is to have an additional ‘scratch’ staff, same as when you wouldn’t have the Swap function in the first place. Reduce the trumpets into it, adjust your voicing and Explode out again.
Interesting idea. I’ll give that a try.
I’m trying to think of a way something like this could be built into a simple command that is consistent with the rest of the Dorico UI. Maybe I am the only person in the universe that would actually want this. But assuming there were a broader interest, how about a companion to the “swap” command that is a “Sort” or “Order” command? The way it could work is:
- User selects all of the measures from multiple players to be ordered.
- Enter the “order” command.
- Dorico would look at each player’s notes and calculate the average pitch among all the selected notes.
- Dorico would use each player’s average pitch as the basis for swapping the measures around.
With such a command, to do the inversion of the trumpet voicing mentioned above, I’d select the 4th trumpet measures, shift them up an octave, then select the corresponding measures from the other trumpet parts and hit the “order” key.
To change from a tight voicing to something more open, I would change the octaves of the notes that need to be spread upward or downward, then select all the measures and hit the “order” button.
Would something like this be useful to others? Maybe it is just me.