I’m working on a flexible arrangement for wind instruments. I want to condense the music in 4 parts en group the parts with a bracket. I have set the brackets in engrave mode with condensing off. But when I turn condensing back on, the brackets are not displayed correctly.
See attachments…
I can’t figure it out, so can someone help me?
Thanks in advance,
Geert
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You should be able to deal with this in Engrave mode, with the brackets and braces tool. Select an item of your top staff, cmd click (additive selection) an item from your bottom staff and click the bracket in the left panel tool. Do that as early as possible in your score, to avoid unconsistecies.
Hope it helps!
Marc, thank you for your reply.
I did already what you suggested. With condensing off, the brackets are fine (see attachments), but with condensing on, Dorico changes the brackets.
There are no condensing changes, even no music in the first page, so I don’t understand why it doesn’t work.
(I have the same problem in part 1 where I group flute, oboe and clarinet, trumpet)
Geert
You have to do it when Condensing is on. The Brackets and braces thing is layout dependant.
In Condensing Land, Flute 1 is one stave, Flute 2 is another stave, and Flute 1.2 is yet another stave. Manual bracketing and bracing is stave-specific.
Marc, I deleted all bracket changes, then with condensing on, I tried to add a bracket, but no result, instead Dorico puts a bracket on the voices on the top 2 staves. 
Here is a link to a pdf of the first 2 pages. I want to bracket part 1 + part 1-easy, same for the other parts. As you see, part 2 en 3 are fine, part 1 en 4 are not.
I find that I have a similar problem to this. I have an orchestral score (basically woodwind in pairs) for which I’m condensing the two Flutes, Clarinets, and Bassoons.
At the start, it all looks great, just as I expect. Then suddenly on page 14 the flutes’ sub-bracket includes only Flute 1, and they don’t condense. Then on page 17 they condense properly again.
More seriously, as of p. 16, the big bracket for woodwind goes only to Bassoon 1, so the Bassoon 2 staff doesn’t belong to any bracket at all. (And, I assume for this reason, they don’t condense.)
If I look at the score in Galley View, there is no big bracket for Woodwind at all, and no sub-brackets for any WW pairs except Oboe-English Horn (which are excluded from condensing, so this may be expected behavior that I haven’t found documented yet). (And, I checked that I have Orchestral set under Ensemble type – this is within Layout Options by the way, not Engraving Options as all the documentation I’ve found says.)
I can correct it by re-selecting brackets etc. page by page, but I have a feeling I’ve set something wrong at a more fundamental level, and I would like to understand. Thanks!
I understand that my question just above is hard (maybe impossible!) to respond to without a file to look at. And I’ve been trying to strip down its size (and replace the notes with something anonymous) so I can share it. But reducing its length also changes the way later systems respond, so it’s been a bit of a struggle.
Finally I just copied the notes into a new file already set up for orchestra. It seems to working as expected in all the respects I mentioned. So I suppose all is well. I’d like to understand what went wrong originally, but oh well.
Thanks for this feedback. Maybe you could send the file by email to Daniel Spreadbury, so that the team can debug if they feel it’s necessary. But I am happy to see that, in normal conditions, everything works as expected!
I think I had the same problem and postet a mini-demoproject here:
For me, the problem starts when more then 2 payers are in a condensing group - wie 2 players
the brackets are kept as they should; it seems not to be the problem that Dorico creates
an additional stave for condensed players in this case.
And wouldn’t it be an interesting improvement for upcoming versions, if Dorico - whatever might happen in the “condensing world” - would keep track of the current bracket settings and create also additional corresponding bracket groups for us if needed?
Will this be possible?
If you require different custom brackets depending on whether condensing is enabled, for the time being you may find it necessary to have two full score layouts, one with condensing enabled and one without it enabled, and appropriate bracket/brace changes in each layout.
That wasn’t the case with my project, but I may (without meaning to) have created or re-set brackets on a later page in Engraving. I still don’t know how I managed to remove the big WW bracket in Galley View while retaining it (albeit shifting from page to page) in Page View… but I’m willing to accept that some things I shall never know. All is well now in the new file, at least.
For me it was not about having different brackets depending on the condensing state, but
- If I have defined in uncondensed mode with a bracket change a main bracket for Trumpets and Trombones, and a subbracket for the lets say three Trumpets, I would expect or wish Dorico to keep this order, that is: I’d like to see the main bracket and subbracket including the 1 or 2 or 3 Trumpet staves in any possible grouping when condensing is swiched on (that is: no condensing, condensing 1,2, condensing 1,2 plus 3, condensing 1,3, condensing 2,3, condensing 1 + 2,3, condensing 1,2,3) from the beginning or from any bracket change up to the end of the flow or up to the next bracket change. At the moment, the Trumpets eg. are thrown out of the main and sub bracket group when condensed to one 1,2,3 stave etc. i.e. no brackets for the Trumpets to be seen at all.
- If that is not possible I would like to be able to adapt the brackets with custom brackets or bracket changes in the condensed score, something I could not achieve. Dorico did not accept bracket changes - thats what the demo file should have shown.
- With condensing groups of two players everything’s fine.
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This is still currently happening and causing a real headache for me currently. The original, uncondensed version of this flex ensemble arrangement is here:
And this is after condensing. Note I do have custom condensing groups, but it appears to be that it’s not the number of instruments that causes an issue, but it’s whether they are originally next to each other in the uncondensed version. See the clar/ssax/trp stave in the 1st group and the bsn/trb/euph stave in the 3rd group to see what I mean. (quick edit: actually, this may not be the case; the 4th group had no issues condensing properly while being in a different order.)
Undoing the bracket changes and redoing them while uncondensed does nothing to change this, nor does attempting to stretch the brackets while in condensed mode. I can’t seem to find a way around this either, and it’s a rather urgent issue for me at the moment.
Thanks to the team for resolving the bracketing bugs. I used to experience those (obviously after this thread was written 
) and I’ve just been correcting a massive file with Dorico 4. Everything now works as expected. Such a relief!
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