I’m struggling here. I created an orchestral score in Sibelius with manually condensed instruments. Now, converted to Dorico, the brackets are wrong. I’ve been going through and uncondensing, so I can do the parts. I had to add a trombone staff, because 1 and 2 were always on one. 3 was on a separate staff. There are, however, places where all three could be on one and places where only 1 or 2 was playing, which is why I’m putting them on 3. Maybe I don’t need to do that, but I should be able to.
What is more awkward is that the brackets came through only where sub-brackets should be. I tried changing them manually in Engrave mode, but then I gave up and tried to Reset Brackets. It only reverted to the original incorrect bracketing. I tried to do it in instrument definition, which sent the trombones berserk. Now I’ve got 2 3-staff trombone parts. Whatever I do to one transfers to the other. I’m manually moving the 3rd part to the 3rd staff of the upper part, which is know as Trombone 1 1, which also doesn’t make sense.
I have it set correctly in layout options, as far as I can tell. (Orchestral)
I know there are two issues here: the instrument definition, as well as the bracketing, but I can’t seem to find a solution that solves either. It doesn’t seem to recognize that families should be bracketed together, and that like instruments should have sub-brackets. I’ve also tried manually bracketing everything, but I’ll create a bracket for the strings, and it will insist that it includes the brass.
This should be easy. What am I missing here?
I’m a super-user of Sibelius, Finale, and Score, but Dorico seems to be defeating me. I’m not enjoying this experience of learning Dorico.
I can only imagine that there’s something funny about the instrument types that you’ve ended up with as a result of the MusicXML import process. Can you delete all but the first bar or two of the music, and attach the resulting trimmed project here so I can take a look?
This page in the Operation Manual explains various ways of deleting entire bars:
Thanks for attaching the project. As I suspected, the issue is that because you’re importing a MusicXML file where the music has been manually condensed onto a smaller number of staves, the instrument types Dorico has created for those combined staves (e.g. “Oboe 1, 2” and the like) are not the standard ones, and hence Dorico doesn’t know how to bracket them.
Because this music should be “un-condensed” onto separate staves for each player, what I suggest you do is create e.g. two additional players holding oboes in Setup mode, then manually copy the music as appropriate onto those new staves, separating the material that should be played by each player, and then remove the combined “Oboe 1, 2” player altogether.
Once you have only the proper, individual players each holding a single instrument with the appropriate material, you can enable condensing to get back to the condensed conductor’s score.
Ouch! That’s going to be a lot of work. I’ve tried it in the dummy file, and that works, but doing it in the regular file means …
Either:
Add the new instruments.
Copy each line individually into the new slot for each of the 4 flows, since, if I am correct, I can only move one at a time (in one flow at a time), since I’m going from a single 2-staff instrument to 2 1-staff instruments.
Delete the old instruments.
Turn on Condensing and the hiding of staves.
Or:
Re-merge the 4 flows.
Add the new instruments.
Copy the instruments for the whole piece one at a time
Delete the old instruments.
Turn on Condensing and the hiding of staves.
Re-split the 4 flows.
Do I have to Explode the manually condensed instruments first before I copy them to the new staff?
(7. Remind myself never to start a project in something else and finish it in Dorico, or convert finished work into Dorico and then try to work on it again, unless each line is a separate instrument.)
I see there is no easy way to merge flows, so that answers that. Definitely an oversight. If you can split, you ought to be able to merge. I know it requires them to have the same instruments, but you could have it automatically add the missing instruments (before the merge point and after). Finale has a convoluted way of merge/appending and Sibelius has you add the instruments manually.
I also noticed that these old 2-staff parts that need to be redistributed have lost all their slurs on the lower staff. I need to rekey them all.
