Just wondering about the best approach for divisi in Dorico. If I know that simple string divisi, for example, will remain on a single staff in the score and the parts, is there any reason to create a divisi staff? Am I missing some reason why it would be more efficient to split a section into multiple staves and then condense later? Likewise, if I have a solo player in a section where I know the rest of the section will not play, is there a point to creating a solo staff? For what it’s worth, I don’t care much about playback issues—I’m only concerned about notation.
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No. Just leave them on one staff.
It all depends on context, particularly whether the individual parts cross each other a lot, or the musical material is very different, or say one part is pizz and the other arco.
No. Just mark the passage Solo and end with Tutti.
I suggest you take some time to study examples from the repertoire. Have a look on IMSLP at anything from Wagner onwards (Mahler, Strauss, Prokofiev, Nielsen, Elgar, Debussy, Ravel etc. etc.) and you will see a variety of approaches.
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Thanks for the info, although I wasn’t asking about divisi in general–I know how it’s handled in the literature. I was asking about how to handle it specifically in Dorico. I’m concerned with the idea that I might be doing things as I might on a handwritten score, only to find out sometime down the line when I’m generating parts or adding cues or something similar that I might suddenly discover that I should have been using the divisi function in the software from the beginning. In my past experience working with large scores in those other notation apps that sometimes one can take an approach that ends up creating a nightmare down the line.
But it seems like from your response that there’s no reason to do anything in Dorico that I wouldn’t otherwise do by hand. Thanks for the input.
Dorico is very flexible. eg. if you decide to add a divisi rather than notate on a single stave, you just add it and move the relevant notes across.