I have a symphony orchestra with two clarinets, the second of which doubling as bass clarinet.
At the start of the score, galley view, Clarinets 1 & 2 are bracketed together, while Bass Clarinet is left outside of the bracket.
When Clar. 2 switches to Bass Clar., I would like it to still be bracketed with Clar. 1 (any reason why it should not do that?).
If I insert a Sub-bracket change to the system where this is necessary, the whole bracketing of … brasses? … is disrupted from the following system.
@MicheleGalvagno, I can’t definitively answer your question, but I recall having some at least vaguely similar trouble with getting brackets the way I needed them. I solved it by adding the players into Groups in Setup Mode.
By the way …
I created a group for the Woodwinds, then double-clicked on the “Group 1”, wrote “Woodwinds”, pressed Return. The name didn’t change.
Double-clicked on “Group 1” again, Dorico crashed.
I’ve experienced this several times as well. Adding a bracket change wreaks havoc with the bracketing in general. Daniel helped me out with one file and deleting the manual change fixed it but what the actual root cause is I still don’t know. Sorry I can’t be more helpful but at least you know you’re not alone!
I really appreciate your input!
So far I have refrained from trying to recreate the groups and see if that helps after the previous crash.
This was the only manual change in the piece, and quite early on it. I honestly cannot think why bracketing clarinets should destroy brasses…
When you add a manual bracket change, it only applies to the staves that are shown in that system explicitly. And when I say “staves”, I mean staves rather than instruments. Because staves in Dorico are dynamic and appear as needed from system to system depending on the requirements of which instruments are shown, which are condensed, and so on, the bracketing change works by specifying the staves where brackets start and stop.
Consequently, when you have a bracketing change for one system and the next system then contains a different set of staves, the previous bracketing change may not produce the result you expect, because the staves that didn’t appear on the previous system are not included in the overridden bracketing.
As a rule of thumb, you should add manual bracketing changes as close to the end of the preparation process as possible, because chances are, once you’ve added one bracketing change, further bracketing changes will be necessary.
Update from the first morning session on this piece.
Since I also wish for the two tenors trombones to have a sub-bracket with the bass trombone, I added that at the start of the piece.
This prevented the sub-bracket for clarinet 1 & bass-clarinet from destroying the bracketing in the brasses going forward but had a strange counter effect: an extra bracket was created for when only one of the percussion staves is shown (the layout option for solo staves in a group is OFF).
Here’s the picture (that bracket wasn’t there before):
Thanks for clarifying! I am indeed in the final part of the preparation for this score. I can add “Reset Bracketing” calls every time something odd happens, but this removes the bracket on the trombones now, requiring yet another change. No problem doing that, if that’s the supposed way and no better one is found.
I also appreciate you weighing in here Daniel. Using custom bracketing my expectation was… ‘add this bracket and leave everything else alone’. So in my case previously I just wanted to add a sub-bracket to the violins and lost the brass and piano brackets. It’s not immediately clear why that would happen (though your explanation makes sense).
It just led me to avoid using them at all since the results are (seemingly) unpredictable and quite terrible. But fortunately there are other ways of setting the desired bracketing from the outset.
Just my personal observations…
