Bracketing and percussion grids

Firstly, I just want to say, what a staggering, immense and outright impressive update. Bravo!

I am working on a project with multiple percussion grids. Each player has their own bracket encompassing their entire grid - however - I wish to also have within each player’s grid sub-brackets, to help visually separate different groups of instruments (to help with ease of reading and to clearly identify actual physical placements of instruments - just one bracket for 11+ instruments is cluttered and it can be hard to immediately see what line belongs to which bloody thing to hit!).

I would make separate, smaller grids of the groups I wish to sub-bracket, and then combine them together as needed with brackets, and format the layout in such a way so that each part shows the correct instruments - but I frequently need to crossbeam / write chords or lines that jump across staves / lines in different instruments, which is impossible if they do not all belong to the same grid!

Please advise! Otherwise, I would love to see such a functionality introduced in a later update!

Many thanks,
Mati

Welcome to the forum, Mati.

At the moment, bracketing works only at the level of the “staff”, which is a somewhat flexible notion in Dorico but not flexible enough to encompass the different lines of a grid presentation. If you’re producing a percussion score, you could try using the single-line instruments presentation type and then set the distance between staves to something very small, e.g. 2 spaces, which will make it look like a grid. Take a look at the attached, which shows the kind of thing that’s possible.

However, this wouldn’t work in a full score with other instruments in as well, of course, so you’d have to reserve this for just the part layout.
perc-brack.dorico.zip (1.36 MB)

Cheers :slight_smile:

Unfortunately this doesn’t help me, as I can’t get the staff lines close enough to emulate a regular 5 line staff (some of my instrument groupings, such as tom-toms, are put together in this manner, albeit in a four line staff)

You should be able to, by specifying a gap of 1 rather than 2 between each instrument in your kit in the Grid page of the Edit Percussion Kit dialog.

Yes, I understand I can do this for the grid setting, but not in the single line setting in a manner to emulate what I can do in in the grid setting.

I would like to attach an example as I have a few other problems that I cannot easily describe without an example, but I cannot make the file smaller than 2,764kb which appears to be above the limit. Anything I can do?

Try changing the playback template to Silence via Play > Playback Template, then resave the project. That should make it quite a bit smaller.

Ah, cheers, that did the trick!

Please see attached - what would be ideal for me would be able to group the bottom two instruments for each player in their own substaff (the gc and tmt), and the staves above each of these groups also together.

While I’m at it, is there any way to hide the rests appearing above the top staff from bar 2? Starting/ending voice or hiding all bar rests in layout options doesn’t seem to do the trick, and I know of no way to force-hide objects.
perc ex.zip (358 KB)

Unfortunately at the moment you can’t hide rests in percussion kits when using the grid or five-line staff presentation type. Normally you can use Edit > Percussion > Change Voice to use either the extra up-stem or down-stem voice (which aren’t padded with rests) to get out of jail on this one, but in this instance I don’t seem to be able to make that work.